After upgrading from OS X Mavericks to OS X Yosemite, I attempted to install ImageMagick from Homebrew, but encountered an error when brew was trying to install the libpng dependency.
The error encountered was:
[20:32:21][user@workstation][~] brew install libpng
==> Downloading https://downloads.sf.net/project/machomebrew/Bottles/libpng-1.6.14.yosemite.bottle.tar.gz
Already downloaded: /Library/Caches/Homebrew/libpng-1.6.14.yosemite.bottle.tar.gz
==> Pouring libpng-1.6.14.yosemite.bottle.tar.gz
Error: The `brew link` step did not complete successfully
The formula built, but is not symlinked into /usr/local
Could not symlink share/man/man5/png.5
/usr/local/share/man/man5 is not writable.
You can try again using:
brew link libpng
==> Summary
/usr/local/Cellar/libpng/1.6.14: 17 files, 1.2M
I tried several of the potential fixes in an older StackOverflow thread about OS X Lion trouble with ImageMagick, but nothing worked.
I finally tried Jonghee Park’s suggestion to correct permissions.
Sure enough, the permissions for the man5 folder in /usr/local/share/man were incorrect:
[20:34:12][user@workstation][index_page] ls -al /usr/local/share/man
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 19 user admin 646 Nov 23 20:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 11 user admin 374 Nov 23 20:29 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 de
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 es
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 fr
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 hr
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 hu
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 it
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 ja
drwxr-xr-x 48 user admin 1632 Nov 23 20:32 man1
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Aug 31 00:00 man5
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 pl
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 pt_BR
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 pt_PT
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 ro
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 ru
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 sk
-rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 1544 Nov 21 00:55 whatis
drwxr-xr-x 3 user admin 102 Oct 19 17:29 zh
The fix was as simple as running the following command:
sudo chown -R user:admin /usr/local/share/man/man5
And, re-running brew link libpng.
This problem did not occur with a fresh install of OS X Yosemite.
