Recurrent Problems on Leopard

environment variables become blank between configure and build phases

This manifests as error messages like: unable to execute -DNDEBUG: No such file or directory. ($CC is an empty string, so what was meant to be the the first argument to the compiler is now the first thing on the command line, and is treated as a command name by the shell.) Seems to frequently occur when building Python modules; see #13930.

This problem can be worked around by cleaning the work area of the affected port (sudo port clean --work foo) and then running the port install (or port upgrade) command again.

Here is ​an analysis of the problem by Bryan Blackburn.

This should be fixed on trunk (r36719, r36722, r39016, r39017) but the fix isn't part of MacPorts 1.6.0. It will be in the next version of MacPorts.

ld: cycle in dylib re-exports with /usr/X11/lib/libGL.dylib

This is the result of a misfeature in Leopard's linker. See Apple's Technical Q&A on the subject ​here. It can generally be fixed by adding the following to the portfile inside a platform darwin 9 block:

configure.ldflags-append 	-dylib_file \
			/System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework/Versions/A/Libraries/libGL.dylib:\
			/System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework/Versions/A/Libraries/libGL.dylib

macfuse fails to build

There is an issue with building macfuse on versions of Leopard prior to 10.5.5, documented in ticket #15889. If it fails to build for you with the error message

undefined local variable or method `trans' for <UNDEFINED> ... </>:REXML::Document

then you've run into #15889. Upgrading to 10.5.5 or later will fix this, or if you can't upgrade for some reason, a possible workaround is given in the ticket.