mac port Uninstall -- Unable to uninstall/deactive

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 9, 2010, at 07:54, kevin beckford wrote:

>> Warning: It appears you have MacPorts or Fink installed.
>> Software installed with MacPorts and Fink are known to cause problems.
>> If you experience issues try uninstalling these tools.
>> Error: No available formula for bzip2
>> 
> 
> I'd be quite interested in what gave that error.  That's a pretty sweeping statement, to tell someone to uninstall hours of compiled code if they experience "issues", 

As Andrea found, this message comes from Homebrew. It's a totally reasonable thing for them to say. MacPorts doesn't have that kind of automatic check (yet), but certainly on the mailing list and in tickets we tell people repeatedly that using MacPorts simultaneously with Fink, or with software installed in /usr/local (which includes Homebrew), will cause them grief as the software begins to mingle in unpredictable and undesirable ways, and that users should pick a single package manager and uninstall the other(s).

> especially since macports by default should be in /opt/local, and if you are installing bzip2, which you don't need to , it's in /usr/bin/bzip2, although that is the osX - BSD version, it should be aiming for /usr/local...

Mac OS X's bzip2 is not a "BSD version". There's no such thing. There's only one version of bzip2, which is the one available at http://bzip.org/

In the particular case of bzip2, which has no dependencies, it shouldn't cause a problem to install it with one package manager while other package managers are installed. However, many other software packages, which have many dependencies, include code that searches for those dependencies in locations where they are likely to be found, which on Mac OS X includes the locations /usr/local, /sw and /opt/local, but who knows in what order they check for them. So it could easily come to pass that a software package being installed with one package manager will inadvertently discover and use a dependency installed with another package manager, which is of course a combination that was never tested and who knows if it will work, not to mention that the dependencies are now not declared correctly (i.e. uninstalling a port you installed with Homebrew might cause a port you installed with MacPorts to stop working).