dbus failed to activate

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 26, 2009, at 22:07, Timothy Lee wrote:

> It looks like dbus is failing to activate on my setup. I have two  
> active macport installs (one in /opt/local and one in /tigeropt/ 
> local). I'm very careful to be using the correct paths based on  
> which version I'm working with. I installed my /opt/local dbus  
> first and the /tigeropt/local second. In my /tigeropt/local/etc/ 
> macports/macports.conf I have startupitem_type set to 'none'.
>
> This is the output I'm receiving when I try to install the /tiger/ 
> opt dbus:
>
> --->  Activating dbus @1.2.12_4+universal
> Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /Library/ 
> LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist already exists and  
> does not belong to a registered port.  Unable to activate port dbus.
> Warning: the following items did not execute (for dbus):  
> org.macports.activate
> Error: The following dependencies failed to build: dbus jpeg libmng  
> autoconf help2man gettext libiconv gperf ncurses ncursesw p5-locale- 
> gettext perl5 perl5.8 m4 automake lcms tiff zlib libtool libpng  
> mysql5 openssl postgresql83 bison libxml2 libxslt ossp-uuid  
> readline sqlite3 unixODBC
> Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.

Both copies of the port want to install the same file, /Library/ 
LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist. This is a startup  
item of sorts that Mac OS X looks for at system startup to start a  
service. This file cannot be placed in a different directory,  
otherwise it will not have any effect. That is why this file's  
location is not confined to ${prefix} and why its location is not  
configurable. So with the way the dbus port is currently written, I'm  
afraid you cannot have it installed and activated simultaneously in  
more than one MacPorts install on a single machine.

The same would be true of any port that uses the startupitem portfile  
keywords or manually installs launchd plists.

Some such ports offer +no_startupitem variants to turn off the  
installation of such files; see e.g. the apache2 port. If that is  
appropriate for dbus, such a variant could be added there.