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 probably
chownthem
. I did that as well. Then I tried to install pkg-config
and ran into the problem described above.