On Jan 7, 2007, at 20:36, belinda thom wrote:
One final question: how does port handle the case where you've already installed something (e.g. subversion) and you then want to "add on" a variant (e.g. +tools)? Does it do a completely new reinstall, or does it piggy-back off of existing things when it can? Is it standard practice to clean out the existing (via port ... clean) before adding the new variant?
Well, you can only have a port activated once. If you already have it activated with one set of variants (or with no variants), then you cannot also have it activated with a different set of variants. You can have it *installed* (compiled) with other sets of variants, but only one of the installed combinations can be *active* (used) at a time. For example, if you did this before: sudo port install subversion +no_bdb And now you decide that you also wanted the tools, you could sudo port install subversion +no_bdb +tools After it finishes compiling, it will tell you it cannot activate the new Subversion because another one is already active. You can then uninstall the other Subversion by specifying the complete version and variant string, like this: sudo port uninstall subversion @1.4.2+no_bdb And then activating the new one: sudo port activate subversion Or, instead of uninstalling, you could just deactivate the old one: sudo port deactivate subversion @1.4.2+no_bdb And then activate the new one: sudo port activate subversion @1.4.2+no_bdb+tools (Here you need to specify the full version/variant string to port activate because there's still more than one installed.)