Homebrew asked me to move macports now it does not work

Question

I'm using HomeBrew for my usual mac stuff but I need to do some experiments with other package managers. So I installed MacPorts. everything seems alright but brew doctor asks me to move it:

warning: You have MacPorts or Fink installed:

This can cause trouble. You don't have to uninstall them, but you may want to

temporarily move them out of the way, e.g. sudo mv /opt/local ~/macports

So I listened and moved it. And then in my bash profile I changed

export PATH="/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH"

to

export PATH="~/macports/bin:~/macports/sbin:$PATH"

and now when I when run port ... it gives me this error:

-bash: /Users/foobar/macports/bin/port: /opt/local/libexec/macports/bin/tclsh8.5: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

What am I doing wrong and how can I solve it?

P.S.1.

I edited the /Users/foobar/macports/bin/port file as the admin and edited the first line from #!/opt/local/libexec/macports/bin/tclsh8.5

to

#!/Users/foobar/macports/libexec/macports/bin/tclsh8.5

now I get this new error:

sources_conf must be set in /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf or in your /Users/foobar/.macports/macports.conf file while executing "mportinit ui_options global_options global_variations" Error: /Users/foobar/macports/bin/port: Failed to initialize MacPorts, sources_conf must be set in /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf or in your /Users/foobar/.macports/macports.conf file

P.S.2.

changed all the /opt/locals to ~/macportss in

/Users/foobar/macports/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/macports/release/tarballs/ports/_ci/bootstrap.sh

and

/Users/foobar/macports/etc/macports/macports.conf

nothing changed!

P.S.3.

I see some of the guys here try to guid me towards removing/uninstalling MacPorts or HomeBrew. That's not what I'm asking for. I am able to revert all I did and make the MacPorts work again (in fact I just did that). My question is why HomeBrew Is saying that? what I happens If I don't do what it is asking for? What if I want the MacPorts too? and most importantly how make the MacPorts keep working after moving?

Answer 1

Disentangling messed up dot files and environment variables and paths might be a lot of work if you didn’t follow the recommended steps precisely or made subsequent changes. What about making a list of the homebrew packages you have (if any) then removing it entirely. Same with macports - don’t try to adapt it to run in a new place - remove it entirely after you know what packages you need.

Then make a brand new user account - install homebrew there cleanly with a default path and having cleaned up /opt before you made the new account.

This will quickly let you know if you have a system problem or it’s just the weight of all the changes made to get the previous software to run.

The alternative to this will be a lot of back and forth and you dumping a ton of data into the question or arranging remote access with someone skilled in picking apart bash/scripting errors and digging into the code and what brew doctor has to say about your setup that’s broken.

Answer 2

-bash: /Users/foobar/macports/bin/port: /opt/local/libexec/macports/bin/tclsh8.5: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

That's your problem right there. While you moved macports, and updated your path, you did not also change all the internal references to the original path.

I looked in that file and found a reference to:

/opt/local/libexec/macports/lib/libtcl8.5.dylib

In general, any unix package larger than a single file can NOT be moved to any random location in the filesystem. It will WORK from any random location but only if you build it there.

When you installed the first program that used the tcl library it got compiled/linked to the full path of that library, along with stuff in /usr/lib and more stuff in /System/Library/Frameworks. Move any of those and a lot of stuff won't run anymore.

So, your choices are:

• Move MacPorts and reinstall everything
• Move homebrew and reinstall everything

Why did homebrew break macports? They wanted to use the same path, something was already there, and it's not their job to deal with someone else's process.

They should have done 10 seconds more research and found a better way, like a non-conflicting path.

Answer 3

Navigate to the directory /Users/foobar/macports/var/macports/registry :

cd /Users/foobar/macports/var/macports/registry

Now query the registry database for installed programs and create a file with all your macports installed programs on your desktop.

sqlite3 registry.db 'select name, requested from ports' | cut -d'|' -f1 > ~/Desktop/macports.txt

Now remove /Users/foobar/macports then follow the uninstall instructions in the MacPorts guide. At this point decide whether to reinstall MacPorts and remove HomeBrew or just use HomeBrew.