2

I'm running Homebrew 0.9.5 under OS X Mavericks. My ultimate goal is to compile the source code for a program (not available through Homebrew) which depends on pkg-config. After installing Homebrew I ran brew install pkg-config, got a "brew link error", and ran brew link --overwrite pkg-config. This gave me a different error: Error: Could not symlink share/doc/pkg-config/pkg-config-guide.html /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-config is not writable. I can't seem to get past this error. Running sudo chmod 666 /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-config does not change the file permissions from -rw-r--r--. Similarly I came across a similar question on this site where the issue was fixed by doing sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local; but this didn't work either in my case. Why am I not able to add write permissions to this file?

More details

I originally thought it would be no big deal to compile pkg-config on my own, but when I tried doing so I found myself in a maze of dependencies: pkg-config requires (and is required by) glib, which requires gettext and libffi. When I tried to compile gettext I was able to run make and make install but got several errors and "...not found" messages in the process. Nonetheless it seemed to be installed correctly. Once I got gettext and libffi installed, I tried to do ./configure glib and got an error related to gettext. At that point I gave up and installed homebrew. After installation I got messages advising I remove some files, and did so. I also got this: Warning: Some directories in /usr/local/share/locale aren't writable. ... You should probablychownthem. I did that as well. Then I tried to install pkg-config and ran into the problem described above.

2 Answers 2

1

According to the error message the directory with permissions issue is /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-config, but you claim to have run sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local which changes ownership of /usr/local directory only, not affecting any sub-directories. You should run

sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-config

and see how that goes. If it doesn't help, please add the output of ls -l /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-config to your post to make it clear what's going on.

As a side note, it's perfectly normal for sub-directories of /usr to be owned by root and not be writable by regular users. Rather than changing the permissions / ownership, you should run commands writing in these directories as root, e.g.

sudo brew install pkg-config
0

Maybe you installed pkg-config before. You may uninstall and reinstall it.

brew uninstall pkg-config

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .