uninstalling a selected port ...

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,

> I believe it is consistent.  As I understand it, the simlinks created by
> "port select" are not *owned* by the selected port.  Since the port
> itself does not maintain these simlinks (but rather 'port select' does),
> there are good arguments to be made that the port should _not_ own
> simlinks created by select.  As a result, uninstalling that port should
> not touch those simlinks.  This results in the errors you saw.

That's correct. However, the symlinks are currently not owned by the corresponding *_select port either, which they probably should and which would solve this problem to some extent, because uninstalling the *_select port would just remove the symlinks.

Of course we could also add a check to MacPorts that would somehow notice that you're currently deactivating a port that's currently selected, but that wouldn't be easy, because updates of a port also deactivate (and later re-activate) it and shouldn't destroy your selection.

I was actually planning on registering the created symlinks to the *_select ports for a while now so trace mode can reliably hide stuff created by the select feature while building (because the selection should never affect how a port builds).

-- 
Clemens Lang