There are various reasons that you might want to have more than one Fink tree on your system:
- Testing packages on both the i386 and the x86_64 architectures.
- To use a package that is only available on i386 or x86_64 when you primarily are using the other architecture.
- To set up a clean Fink tree for test purposes.
Setting up another distribution is relatively straightforward.
- Follow the Fink source install instructions, but stop before the point of running pathsetup.sh.
- You are only going to want to have one Fink tree active when you’re building packages. You can switch between trees by editing $HOME/.profile (or whichever startup file your Fink setup is using). For example, change
test -r /sw/bin/init.sh && . /sw/bin/init.sh
to
test -r /sw64/bin/init.sh && . /sw64/bin/init.sh
if you have a Fink tree in /sw and another one in /sw64. Then start a new terminal window to load the new environment settings.
- To use executables from one Fink tree while the other is active, append its executable directories to your PATH. An example from a $HOME/.profile would be:
test -r /sw64/bin/init.sh && . /sw64/bin/init.sh export PATH=$PATH:/sw/bin:/sw/sbin
Note: some packages use executable scripts for build configuration purposes, so you may need to remove the second Fink executable directory from the PATH if you’re having problems.
