Failure to port Octave

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 20, 2008, at 23:11, Bryan Blackburn wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 11:38:45PM -0500, Robert Fong-tom said:
>>
>
>> I tried to port Octave using MacPorts the port failed because of the
>> following error.
>>
>> Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /Library/
>> Frameworks/AquaTerm.framework/AquaTerm already exists and does not  
>> belong
>> to a registered port.  Unable to activate port aquaterm.
>> Error: The following dependencies failed to build: gnuplot  
>> aquaterm gd2
>> autoconf help2man p5-locale-gettext perl5.8 m4 automake jpeg libtool
>> pdflib gsed hdf5 pcre qhull texinfo lzmautils texlive texlive_base
>> texi2html texlive_texmf-full texlive_texmf-minimal
>> Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.
>>
>> Does anyone know what this means?
>
> It's telling you that something/someone installed the AquaTerm  
> framework
> into /Library/Frameworks (not MacPorts, yet), and the aquaterm port  
> wants to
> do the same.  For safety reasons, MacPorts stopped at that point  
> instead of
> overwriting.
>
> Basically you need to figure out what it was that initially  
> installed the
> AquaTerm framework, and act accordingly.

Possibly it was in fact the aquaterm port that installed it in the  
past, and then the port was later uninstalled but the case of the  
port name in the uninstall command did not match. The port name is  
"aquaterm" but if you said "sudo port uninstall AquaTerm" then  
MacPorts would claim to have uninstalled the port, but actually  
didn't remove any files. This was a bug in 1.6.0 and earlier which  
will be fixed in 1.7.0.

http://trac.macports.org/ticket/11759

If that's what happened in your case, you can manually remove the  
files it mentions, or (since there will likely be lots of them and  
you'll be here all night removing files) you could tell MacPorts to  
overwrite the files, using the -f flag:

sudo port -f activate aquaterm

The old files will still be around, just be renamed. You can leave  
them there or remove them later if you like.