Macports 1.5-10.5 fails to install on a brand new Mac - readline

[slivnik@…]

Fresh installation of Mac OS X 10.5.1, transferred over my /usr/local from my old iBook G4 and tried to install MacPorts, which failed at the "selfupdate" stage as follows. MacPorts should be able to cope with me having something in /usr/local it doesn't like.

[afb@…]

The error is due to the incompatible version of readline installed in /usr/local.

[slivnik@…]

Yes of course. That version of readline is required by other software installed in our /usr/local partition. There are many other libraries on our /usr/local partition which are likely to be incompatible with MacPorts. This is standard setup - to put local libraries in /usr/local. MacPorts should be able to handle that; if not, I suggest it is broken.

[afb@…]

In your /usr/local/lib, do you have libreadline.dylib too - or only libreadline.a ?

[markd@…]

MacPorts has already been fixed in HEAD to not compile readline support in by default. When 1.6 comes out (within a few weeks) the change will get rolled into the binary installer. For now you'll need to work around it by renaming /usr/local while installing MP binary, or install MP from source by checking it out from SVN and installing it that way. ​http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/wiki/GetMacPortsSource

[slivnik@…]

Yes I do also have libreadline.dylib.

I have no objection to MacPorts being compiled with readline support - in fact I think it is a bonus. I just believe it should use its own (in /opt/local) rather than rely on whatever is in /usr/local.

I am rather mystified by this, because even if MacPorts does not use its own readline, the default system library search order is /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, so it must either (i) go out of its way to request the /usr/local/lib version, or, (ii) specifically request libreadline.a (the /usr/lib hierarchy contains only libreadline.dylib, not libreadline.a).

By the way, my /usr/local tree contains (for now) only the PowerPC version of libreadline, and I was building MacPorts on an Intel Core 2 Duo machine.

[markd@…]

<< I have no objection to MacPorts being compiled with readline support

It has been turned off by default because it is only used in MP interactive mode -a seldom used option. So your non-objection is mute. If you want to know the reasons why readline causes so much trouble for MP, ask the MP developer list or search the list archives. But I think you are simply wrong about how gcc searches for stuff. We turned it off because of all the "oh man it's so easy to avoid /usr/../readline problems" assertions over time; yet actually doing it goes way beyond MP (gcc issues I think) and I don't believe anyone ever came up with a way that would work. But as I said, if you want to argue for the ease of a hypothetical solution, look at the macports-dev archives first and bring the discussion to the list because this has all been discussed before at length. But as I said, it has been turned off and probably few (if any) will miss MP interactive mode.

[jmpalacios (Juan Manuel Palacios)]

Will be a non-issue once MacPorts 1.6.0 is out, very soon now!

-jmpp

[tobypeterson]

Milestone MacPorts base bugs deleted