Unable to install Meld by MacPorts

Question

I found that other people too have had trouble in installing Meld to Mac by MacPorts.

I run

sudo port install meld 

I get

sudo port install meld  
 --->  Activating shared-mime-info @0.60_0
Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /opt/local/bin/update-mime-database already exists and does not belong to a registered port.  Unable to activate port shared-mime-info.
Error: The following dependencies failed to build: py25-gnome gconf gtk2 shared-mime-info orbit2 libidl gnome-vfs desktop-file-utils gnome-mime-data libbonobo libbonoboui libglade2 libgnome esound audiofile libgnomecanvas libart_lgpl libgnomeui gnome-icon-theme hicolor-icon-theme icon-naming-utils p5-xml-simple p5-xml-namespacesupport p5-xml-sax gnome-keyring libtasn1 py25-gtk py25-cairo py25-numpy py25-nose py25-gobject py25-orbit
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing. 

How can you install Meld to Mac?

Answer 1

As rspeed said, you probably had a bad install or upgrade that created that file. Alternately, you installed something outside of macports into the /opt/local tree (though I'm not sure how you would have ended up doing that). I recommend just doing a force activate of the shared-mime-info port, then trying to reinstall meld.

sudo port activate -f shared-mime-info
sudo port install meld

Answer 2

I found that MacPorts worked to install meld, but it didn't work straight away as advertised.

After running and installing all the dependencies, it failed, and gave a cryptic log message similar to the one in this question (but not identical).

After a bit of digging around I found I had to do the following:

Make sure I had properly agreed to the license for XCode

xcodebuild -license

Install the Xcode command line tools

xcode-select --install

Install rarian (it seems to be a dependency that MacPorts failed to recognize)

sudo port install rarian

The latter instructions come from here: http://www.codez.co.uk/2014/02/meld-on-mac-osx-mavericks-10-9/ and this was the last step before I was able to get it working.