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20081129 Saturday November 29, 2008

Getting Past Bad Checksums in MacPorts

Back in the 1990's I used FreeBSD fairly extensively. One of my favorite things about the FreeBSD project was the "ports and packages" system for installing libraries and application software. Since Mac OS X is, essentially, BSD with a lot of updated chrome, it's not surprising that there's a well functioning "ports and packages" system for it, MacPorts. While it's not perfect, MacPorts seems to function and dovetail nicely with everything I use my Mac for, more so than Fink. Sure, dpkg/apt-get seems to work OK on Debian, every effort I've encountered to apply that model elsewhere has left me disappointed... anyway, yum seems to work well enough, I don't expect to use Debian again.

Recently I found myself with a port that would not install, 

port install postgis
would bomb out: 
"Target org.macports.checksum returned: Unable to verify file checksums" postgis
It's not a very helpful error message. After some RTFM ("man port", imagine that), I figured there musta been some cruft in the way, so I did this: 
port -d selfupdate
port clean --all postgis
port install postgis
And I'm in business with the latest version of PostGIS. Yes, I coulda installed all of that stuff by hand but MacPorts generally has just what I need in a time-saving way. Note, I do all my MacOS X system administration as root so I'm not typing "sudo" all of the time.

                 

( Nov 29 2008, 03:10:44 PM PST ) Permalink