Re-do MacPorts after upgrading from Tiger to Leopard on PPC?

[Dave Howell]

On Mar 13, 2009, at 22:47 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> Then later in the list you will come to mysql5 +server and ask  
> MacPorts to install it and it will go and build the whole thing  
> again, only it won't be able to activate mysql5 +server because  
> mysql5 with no variants is already active.
>
> Same for php5, which will already be active with its default  
> +apache2 variant so the new +apache2+mysql5 won't be able to be  
> activated.
>
>
> You would have to replicate the MacPorts dependency engine in your  
> script if you wanted to handle this correctly. But then why not  
> implement it inside MacPorts itself. Which you would be welcome to  
> do. But it's not something users need to do all that often. There  
> are other issues in MacPorts base that might be more important to  
> fix. But if you feel drawn to provide a solution for this issue in  
> MacPorts base, we could start by discussing how it might work and  
> what the command might be called.

I've kind of lost track of what's being discussed here, so if what I'm  
about to say isn't actually a similar case, then we can just move it  
to a new subject heading, but having to rebuild, oh, more or less  
everything can be required in other circumstances than just upgrading  
the OS. I spend not quite four full days trying to get MacPorts to  
install 'ntop.' One of the most exasperating failures was, after  
MacPorts had spent most of the day downloading and installing all but  
one or two of the 30+ dependent programs, it stopped cold because this  
particular program was all bent out of shape because my OSX 10.4  
system didn't have the very most recent version of the DevTools  
installed. (2.4.1, if I recall correctly).

So I get them, and install them, and ask MacPorts to carry on. But now  
I'm getting some other error, which turns out to reflect some kind of  
library link failure. After a few hours of trying to blindly figure  
out who needed to be uninstalled and reinstalled in order to get the  
libraries to line up, I give up and uninstall everything. Even that  
failed; apparently MacPorts was linking to some part of itself. Only  
scrubbing the entire installation and reinstalling MacPorts from  
scratch allowed me to get past that problem.

Sadly, even that wasn't enough to get me a working installation of  
ntop. Ntop's port scripts are very badly broken. After MacPorts got  
all the dependencies installed, I had to then install ntop itself by  
hand.

But I definitely would have appreciated being able to tell MacPorts  
"No, I don't care if you *think* that everything's up to date. Please  
reinstall X, and trust me when I tell you that you need to recompile  
the entire tree of dependencies, too."