On 23 Jan, 2008, at 12:34, James Sumners wrote:
I just upgraded from a PowerBook to a MacBook Pro. The migration assistant tool kept my old macports system intact. I can still run all of the ports I had installed; particularly, I can still use TeXmacs and teTeX. However, I had built all of my ports as PPC binaries, so they are running via Rosetta. This also means I can't update any of my ports because port fails to recognize the architecture. Since there have been so many posts lately about things failing to build on 10.5, I'm a little scared to wipe my old macports system and rebuild from scratch. I particularly can't afford to be without a LaTeX environment right now.
So, is there any way I can "jail" a new installation of macports? If I can build everything successfully, I want to be able to delete the old version and move the new one to the standard location.
You can have multiple installs of MacPorts on a single system. However, some ports may not work if you change the location of the installation. So, I would recommend that you move the existing installation aside (i.e. `sudo mv /opt/local /opt/ppc`) and install a new one in its place. If you succeed at getting the new one running sufficiently, you can get rid of the old one; otherwise move the old one back in place. In order to quarantine two MacPorts installations, you should build them from source. The tarballs are available on the Downloads [1] page. You should ./configure them along the lines of the following: % ./configure --prefix=/opt/local \ --with-tclpackage=/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl You can pick something other than /opt/local if you want, but it might not work to move it back to /opt/local later, should you care. Also, it's possible that you might get conflicts for files installed in / Applications/MacPorts or /Library/Frameworks. The Guide [2] briefly discusses this issue too. [1] http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/downloads/ [2] http://guide.macports.org/#installing.source.multiple Regards, Chris