Existing configuration scripts at the request of a brew doctor

Question

I am completely new to installing Homebrew and Anaconda, and I hope someone can help me with a warning after completing the doctor’s brew. I am running on Snow Leopard 10.6.8. The warning is as follows:

Warning: "config" scripts exist outside your system or Homebrew directories. `./configure` scripts often look for *-config scripts to determine if software packages are installed, and what additional flags to use when compiling and linking. Having additional scripts in your path can confuse software installed via Homebrew if the config script overrides a system or Homebrew provided script of the same name. We found the following "config" scripts: /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/freetype-config /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/libpng-config /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/libpng15-config /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/llvm-config /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/python-config /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/python2-config /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/python2.7-config /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/xml2-config /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/xslt-config 

I ran brew --config and the following shows the configuration (hope this helps with the problem):

 HOMEBREW_VERSION: 0.9.4 ORIGIN: (none) HEAD: (none) HOMEBREW_PREFIX: /usr/local HOMEBREW_CELLAR: /usr/local/Cellar CPU: dual-core 64-bit penryn OS X: 10.6.8-i386 Xcode: 3.2.6 GCC-4.0: build 5494 GCC-4.2: build 5666 LLVM-GCC: build 2335 Clang: 1.7 build 77 X11: 2.7.4 => /opt/X11 System Ruby: 1.8.7-358 Perl: /usr/bin/perl Python: /Users/user.name/anaconda/bin/python Ruby: /usr/bin/ruby => /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby 

Sincerely appreciate your help. Thanks.

Answer 1

tl; dr : you cannot fix it, but you can probably ignore it

Those scripts ending in -config provide information for other packages that want to bundle them during installation. Take libpng for example. If brew (or something really) compiles a package that depends on libpng , it can run libpng-config to find out some details about the library.

The problem is that brew displays its own version of libpng , so if both are installed, brew may install the wrong libpng-config when installing additional software.

Now you can do one of four:

• Ignore this warning if you are sure that the material that you install using the homegrown will not conflict with the material that comes with the anaconda.

• Edit ~/.bash_profile and remove anaconda from PATH. If you do this, you will need to specify the full path every time you want to run anaconda python.

• Move these anaconda configuration files to the side (from your PATH, for example, to the config subdirectory). This will probably prevent additional software from connecting to anaconda components, but it should be nice if you intend to isolate the anaconda.

• Uninstall anaconda completely (just delete the folder) and install the python brew version. It will also give you pip that should make it easy to reinstall most of the other packages that come with anaconda.

  i.e.

   brew install python 

  Then for installation, for example. numpy, just:

   pip install numpy 

  (To make python brew, add export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH" to your ~/.bash_profile )