Build problem - help wanted

[Doug Barton]

On 10/21/2011 20:15, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> In message <4EA22C60.8080207 at FreeBSD.org>, 
> Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
>>> I am just simply trying to bring up a fresh new 8.2-RELEASE system and trying
>>> to get a bunch of ports I need to have installed on it installed.
>>>
>>> To do this, I have run either portinstall or portupgrade on something like
>>> 30-40 different ports of things I need.
>>
>> You left out portmaster. :)  But seriously, you didn't mention 'update
>> your ports tree' in that list of things to do.
> 
> Well, so this time _I_ must plead guilty of ass-uming.
> 
> I assumed that people would implicitly understand that I wouldn't be asking
> the kind of question I was asking unless I had just recent done a "portsnap
> fetch extract", which in fact I did do within 18 hours prior to posting about
> the gtk build failure.

18 hours is still really old. Your best bet is always to do an update of
your ports tree right before trying to update your installed ports.

>> You used the word "admonish" in your message several times, as if you
>> believe I'm somehow telling you that you did something wrong.
> 
> You said something like "Make sure all of you ports are up to date", and it
> did sound a bit dismissive... sort of like something that somebody would say
> to a newbie to make him just go away quitely with his head down.

I re-read what I wrote, and I'm still confused about how you'd think
that. In any case, it wasn't my intention, and if you felt that way I'm
sorry.

>> I assure
>> you that's not the case. I was simply trying to help you understand how
>> to improve the situation for the future.
> 
> Well, then I'm sorry if _I_ seemed to be flying off.  But then again, as I
> said, even taken as something well-meaning, your advice was not altogether
> helpful due to its circular nature.  I mean in effect the the essence of
> your final bit of advice seemed to be ``Keep all of your ports up to date
> at all times and then you won't ever have any build problems while attempting
> to keep your ports up to date.''
> 
> I assume that by now you have grasped the circularity.

What I said specifically was that we don't support partial updates.
Since your message indicated that you were already using a tool to keep
your ports up to date I assumed (there I go again) that I didn't need to
be more explicit.

>> I snipped the rest of your message since it's more of the same. I
>> specifically said that I wasn't disagreeing with you on the specifics,
>> you could very well be right. That said, tools like portupgrade or
>> portmaster will help you make sure that the lower-level dependencies are
>> up to date before building the things that depend on them.
> 
> Yes, they will, at least in those cases where the port maintainer has properly
> listed _all_ of the actual dependencies (which seems not to be the case, at
> present, for gtk).

As you pointed out in your post, devel/gobject-introspection is already
listed as a BUILD_DEPENDS. The fact that sometimes dependencies do get
missed is an area that we are always looking to improve.

>> You might consider using one of them.
> 
> I _was_ in fact using portinstall at the time the build failure I first wrote
> about occured.  As I understand it, portinstall performs all of the same auto-
> matic forced pre-builds of dependences as portupgrade does.  Are you asserting
> that that is NOT the case?

I've never used it, so I can't say authoritatively one way or the other.
Given your experience my guess is that it does not. I specifically
listed portupgrade, which I'm told does a thorough job; and portmaster
which I'm quite sure does a thorough job (although admittedly I'm
biased). You might consider giving one of those a try instead.


Doug

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