Chris, thanks for the quick reply. You are correct, a private macports installation would enable testing ports without special privilege. Actually I have already done this many times for testing and debugging other cases.
However, I would like to find an intermediate solution that avoids full build-up from sources. My main reasons are (1) test sensitivity to installed ports in the system prefix; (2) save time and effort; and (3) be able to provide compact, uncomplicated reproducers to third parties. If not currently possible, it would be nice to have a new feature to enable local repository testing, with fallback to the system prefix for everything not found in the local repository. On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 3:09 PM Christopher Jones <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I might be wrong, but I do not believe it is possible to temporarily > change the install prefix, for a single port. > > Most probably you will need to start a new installation, using a custom > installation prefix, from scratch. see > > https://www.macports.org/install.php#source > > on installing from source, which you will need to do to change the > installation prefix, as its a configure time option. > > Chris > > On 17 Jan 2020, at 9:33 pm, Dave Allured - NOAA Affiliate via > macports-users <[email protected]> wrote: > > I am on a corporate network with ports installed normally in /opt/local, > controlled by system admins. Users do not have any write access into > system directories. I would like to use a local portfile repository in > user space, as described in Macports guide 4.6. > > How can I test ports in the local repository? The "portindex" command > works as expected in this directory. However, "port install" fails with > "Insufficient privileges to write to MacPorts install prefix". I need a > way to tell "port install" to use a local prefix, rather than the default > system prefix, for only the port under test. > > I figured that I could avoid tampering with the protected sources.conf, by > manually pre-staging the desired distfiles in the local repository. Here > is my embryonic directory structure: > > $HOME/portx/science/netcdf-fortran/Portfile > $HOME/portx/science/netcdf-fortran/files/patch-Makefile.in.diff > > $HOME/portx/var/macports/distfiles/netcdf-fortran/netcdf-fortran-4.5.2.tar.gz > > Thank you for any advice. > >
