Hi Christoph,
You can see in the logs that configure decided to use the ´ar´ installed by the binutils port. (The link in /opt/local/bin is named ´gar´ to avoid conflicts with Appöe's ar, but the link in /opt/local/i386-apple-darwin8.9.1/bin/ is named ´ar´.) Could this be the cause? Do you have the binutils port installed?
Further to my last email on this, I installed binutils and got exactly the error you described, then deactivated binutils, cleaned gcc42 and tried installing gcc42 again, and it worked fine. See if you can do a clean install of gcc42 after deactivating binutils. If that works, it would be great if you could file a ticket about the problem (if you do, don't forget to put yourself and the maintainers of binutils and gcc42 into the Cc: field on the ticket, as the MacPorts Trac installation doesn't currently forward automatically to the reporter or assignee). Kind regards, Maun Suang -- Boey Maun Suang (Boey is my surname) Email: boeyms at macports dot org