From: Walt Mankowski Date: 19:37 on 05 Mar 2008 Subject: Macports package dependencies On Sun, Dec 30, 2007 at 06:16:02PM -0500, Walt Mankowski wrote: > And don't get me started on the hateful way they handle package > dependencies... I had some out of date macports packages, and today seemed like a good time to upgrade them. The manpage for port(1) lists among its options: -R also upgrade dependents (only for upgrading) -u uninstall non-active ports when upgrading and uninstalling So I figured that running "port -uR libpng" would upgrade any packages that depend on libpng, and then remove the old copies. But instead of doing that, it just upgraded itself. Then it complained that it couldn't remove the old copy because aterm depended it it: ---> Unable to uninstall libpng 1.2.24_0+darwin_8, the following ports depend on it: ---> aterm Error: Uninstall libpng 1.2.24_0+darwin_8 failed: Please uninstall the ports that depend on libpng first. It helpfully repeated the messages 6 times to make sure I saw them. *Sigh* Walt
From: Walt Mankowski Date: 23:16 on 30 Dec 2007 Subject: My own personal perl I hate macports. I know lots of people love it, but it seems like no matter what I try to do with it, I end up wanting to tear out my hair. I hate macports, and it hates me right back. Everyone's been telling me how great git is (I suspect it's as hateful as any other vc software, but I won't know until I try it on a real project), so I decided to give it a try. On debian this is easy -- "apt-get install git-core". But installing it on my macs wasn't so easy. Git sadly isn't in fink, so I tried installing it from macports. As you'd expect, before it could build git-core it had to download and install some dependencies, things like expat and libiconv. I figured it was going to take a while so I went back to what I was doing. A few minutes later I checked to see how it was doing. To my surprise, it was building perl! WTF! Oh, and since according to the macports installation instructions. /opt/local/bin was at the front of my PATH, their perl was now my default perl! I'd just been using the default Tiger perl (5.8.6, I think) so none of the CPAN modules I'd installed were visible to this perl. According to the macports people, this is a Feature. Everything's supposed to be self-contained, so since git-core comes with a few auxiliary perl scripts it needs its own copy of perl as well. I suppose that makes some sort of sense. But it seems to me that if you can't figure out how to install a few perl scripts ON A SYSTEM THAT SHIPS WITH PERL without essentially breaking the system perl, then something's very, very wrong. Sigh. And don't get me started on the hateful way they handle package dependencies... Walt
From: Walt Mankowski Date: 23:34 on 27 Jul 2007 Subject: Link Parser hate I've been lurking on this list for a while now, and it's well past time I contributed my own rant about hateful software. My day job as a CS grad student has me looking into NLP software. On Wednesday I found an interesting-looking module on CPAN called Lingua::LinkParser which seemed to do more or less what I was looking for, so I figured I'd download it and give it a try. It requires some libraries from CMU, but the site appeared to be down all day. Luckily it was back up yesterday and I was able to download it to take a look. Hate #1 -- the Makefile doesn't have an install target. Hate #2 -- it doesn't create any libraries. It just leaves a bunch of .o files under obj/. But I was happy to see that someone's taken the time to package it up for Debian, so I gave that a try today on a different box. It installed just fine. Now it was time to try out the Perl module. I expanded the tarball and ran "perl Makefile.PL". The first thing it did was ask me to Enter the path to your Link Parser distribution directory: It assumes you've been lazy and just kept everything in the directory that was created when you expanded the Link Parser tarball. Headers, objects, and data all need to be under the same top-level directory. Debian, of course, puts the headers under /usr/include, the objects under /usr/lib, and the data under /usr/share. And of course the Link Parser site was down again most of today. Hate. Walt
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