Remove/Reinstall of MacPorts

After trying to upgrade Mercurial to the latest version via MacPorts, I ran into some compilation issues with a couple dependencies that I could not resolve at all. After realizing that there were dependency resolution issues amongst different versions of dependencies for different ports, I decided to remove and reinstall MacPorts from scratch. This provided a clean slate and everything worked without a problem, though I was annoyed that I had to take this drastic action and spend the time to get MacPorts working again.

Bash Completion For Git

One thing that I ran into was another change to the bash completion and prompt for git. As I mentioned in a previous post about this topic, the location of the location for the git-prompt.sh file had changed but this time I discovered that I had to source both the git-completion.bash file and the git-prompt.sh file to get things working. Below is what worked for me.

if [ -f /opt/local/share/git-core/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash ]; then
  . /opt/local/share/git-core/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash
fi

if [ -f /opt/local/share/git-core/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh ]; then
  . /opt/local/share/git-core/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh
fi

Bash Version 4.x

As I was reinstalling ports I noticed some logging that flew by in the terminal stating something about a requirement to use Bash 4 for the bash completion functionality to work properly. So I decided to utilize the newer version of Bash installed by MacPorts and here's how:

1. Add the path to the new bash (/opt/local/bin/bash) to /etc/shells
2. Use the chsh utility to change the shell to the new bash: chsh -s /opt/local/bin/bash
3. After closing the terminal and opening a new one, check the bash version using either of these methods:

   $ echo $BASH_VERSION
   4.2.42(2)-release
   

As long as the version displayed is the newer version from MacPorts, you should be ready to go.

Just for my own sake and in case I need it in the future, I'm going to list a number of items that I had to reinstall:

$ sudo port install git-core +bash_completion +doc +svn
$ sudo port install tig 
$ sudo port install mercurial +bash_completion
$ sudo port install gnupg curl wget ncftp tree pstree watch screen proctools mtr cowsay
$ sudo port install postgresql90-server

For more info about installing and configuring PostgreSQL, see my post titled 'Installing PostgreSQL 9.0 on Mac OS X 10.6.8 via MacPorts' that walks you through many steps to get PostgreSQL up and running.