redemption in a blog

ImageMagick port “broken” temporarily

May 29, 2007

Just in case anyone runs into this problem (which, I might add, would probably go away when either the portfile is updated or the source mirror fixes the problem) while installing ImageMagick via MacPorts…

While trying to install Rmagick on my spanking, new, glossy, kakkoii MacBook, MacPorts reported a checksum error with the ImageMagick source tarball:

Target com.apple.checksum returned: Unable to verify file checksums

At first, I thought it was an outdated portfile but even after a sudo port selfupdate and sudo port -d sync, the checksum error was still occurring (checksum of the file: 4bcb4264c2170fe562b10a732f43e7af, expected checksum in the portfile: 9469ce1b1b645f8c728158cc434b0ff8).

Turns out, the first listed master site (where MacPorts gets its source files from), http://imagemagick.linux-mirror.org/download/ is hosting a source tarball with a bad checksum. Digging around the man page for port a bit, and switching the order of the master source sites solved it, so it was just a case of a bad file on one of the mirror sites.

sudo port edit imagemagick to edit the portfile and change the source mirror to a legit one. You should see something like this:

master_sites \
  http://imagemagick.linux-mirror.org/download/ \
  http://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/ImageMagick/ \
  sourceforge:imagemagick \
  ftp://ftp.imagemagick.net/pub/${name}/ \
  ftp://ftp.fifi.org/pub/ImageMagick/ \
  ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/${name}/

Just move an alternative master_site to the top of the list (I used the SourceForge one). There probably is a way to specify the master_site on the command line with port install but I’ve had just about enough of reading man pages and the now nearly unfindable MacPorts documentation (whatever happened to the old Darwin Ports site that had great documentation?)

Anyway, I’ve written to the webmaster of the mirror site linux-mirror.org, so this would probably be fixed for all two of you who are gonna be installing ImageMagick via MacPorts within these few days or so. Still, it was a good exercise in debugging bad port installations.

Posted by Chu Yeow at May 29, 2007 SGT | Permalink | | Category: Applications, Mac, Open Source