Hi Onno, Something (and that something is not firedrake - firedrake has no code to change directory permissions) has set /usr/local to be not writable by your user. If your user cannot write to /usr/local then homebrew will not work, and consequently neither will firedrake-update. You need to change the permissions on /usr/local so that your user can write to it. homebrew has suggested one way that you can do that. If you're not comfortable with that, I suggest you should take your laptop to your tech support and get them to do it. Sorry I can't give you more helpful advice than that but, as noted above, this is not actually a firedrake bug so there is nothing we can directly do about it. Regards, David On Fri, 5 Aug 2016 at 08:08 Onno Bokhove <O.Bokhove@leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

brew update

Error: The /usr/local directory is not writable.

Even if this directory was writable when you installed Homebrew, other

software may change permissions on this directory. Some versions of the

"InstantOn" component of Airfoil are known to do this.

You should probably change the ownership and permissions of /usr/local

back to your user account.

sudo chown -R $(whoami):admin /usr/local

If I then do the sudo one I get a warning that this

may lead to severe damage. SO I have no yet done that.

------------------------------ *From:* firedrake-bounces@imperial.ac.uk <firedrake-bounces@imperial.ac.uk> on behalf of Homolya, Miklós <m.homolya14@imperial.ac.uk> *Sent:* Thursday, August 4, 2016 9:23 PM *To:* firedrake *Subject:* Re: [firedrake] failed update

Dear Onno,

Can you please try these?

$ brew update

$ brew install autoconf

What does the following say?

$ brew doctor

Thanks,

Miklos ------------------------------ *From:* firedrake-bounces@imperial.ac.uk <firedrake-bounces@imperial.ac.uk> on behalf of Onno Bokhove <O.Bokhove@leeds.ac.uk> *Sent:* 04 August 2016 21:17:48 *To:* firedrake *Subject:* [firedrake] failed update

Did:

firedrake-cleanand/or recovering from the broken installation by

cd src/firedrake git pull ./scripts/firedrake-install --rebuild-script

then firedrake-update

but get error message:

Error: No such keg: /usr/local/Cellar/autoconf

Error: Cannot write to /usr/local/Cellar

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/Users/amtob/werk/firedrake/bin/firedrake-update", line 813, in <module>

brew_install("autoconf")

File "/Users/amtob/werk/firedrake/bin/firedrake-update", line 250, in brew_install

check_call(["brew", "install"] + arguments)

File "/Users/amtob/werk/firedrake/bin/firedrake-update", line 228, in check_call

subprocess.check_call(arguments, env=env)

File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.10_2/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 540, in check_call

raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd)

subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['brew', 'install', 'autoconf']' returned non-zero exit status 1

on laptop while firedrake worked few weeks ago.