mac port Uninstall -- Unable to uninstall/deactive

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Dec 10, 2010, at 03:46, kevin beckford wrote:

>> 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/
> 
> Fair enough.  Still, it comes with the os, and it's in the default
> path set by path_helper.

That's true. But bzip2 is not like grep or sed or tar, for which there are separately-developed GNU and BSD versions which behave differently from one another. bzip2 is not developed by either the GNU or BSD projects; it's developed by an individual named Julian Seward, and works the same everywhere it works.


> Anyway, before I recommended to someone "erase all the other stuff"  I
> might say:
> 
> "remove the references in the .profile or shell rc files, hash -r to
> init or even log out or reboot."  Stuff like that.

But that would not prevent the problem.

Take for example mongodb, whose SConstruct file explicitly checks first /sw and then /opt/local for its dependencies. If the user has Fink installed, and mongodb's dependencies installed with Fink, and installs mongodb with MacPorts, the dependencies from Fink will be found and used. Or, if the user has only MacPorts, but has it somewhere other than /opt/local, the dependencies won't be found at all. We have to patch this file so that this unwanted behavior does not happen:

http://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/databases/mongodb/files/patch-SConstruct.diff?rev=71851

Some port authors may overlook these kinds of issues leading to problems if both package managers are used, irrespective of what may be in the PATH.

Erasing (or moving to a different location) anything installed by other package managers is what we too recommend.