upgrades

[Bill Vermillion]

I know you'll find this hard to believe, but on Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 20:47 ,
Matthew D. Fuller actually admitted to saying:

> On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 07:28:15PM -0500 I heard the voice of
> Bill Vermillion, and lo! it spake thus:

> > As to having one CVSsup on one machine and using nfs for the others
> > that is up to you.

> I did this for years.  Saved bandwidth (and load on the cvsup
> servers), saved disk space, saved processor, and saved me headaches
> trying to keep track of what built when.  If you've got a bunch of
> systems that are otherwise fairly identical anyway, I'd recommend it.

All mine do the CVSup in the wee hours of the morning and I'm on
Level 3 backbone - and we haven't hit our bandwidth cap yet - even
with one server that is always #1 on Google and MS.

> > Where you can run into stale binaries are things from ports where
> > things change- and if you forget to perform portupgrade and just do
> > a new install.  Sometimes locations change.

> Ironically enough, I just last month or so had a major problem with a
> stale binary.  I tried for a week to upgrade something gnome-related
> (libgnomeprint, I think?), and it kept bombing out in the build with
> really weird errors.  I finally tracked it down to its dependancy on
> bison, which port wasn't even installed.  And it didn't install the
> port because it found /usr/bin/bison (datestamp Dec 30, 1999) and used
> it.  So, yes, doing a `ls -lt` every once in a while is a good
> thing...

Ah - that rings a bell - an out of tune bell :-).  But in my case
slightly inverted. 

I had soemthing that needed to update Bison and it kept failing
with gmake ?? which was called in the upgrade process.  I started
saving saving logs and found when it dropped into a sub-directory
it lost the global varialbes it was expecting [or something similar
to that].

I had failures on 5 different servers.  And I went to the 6th
server - a newer one - and things just flew right along.  This was
about 2 weeks after trying to find the problems on the other
servers.

It turns out that while I was using the KSH - the real one from
David Korn - the machine that worked had a newer version of ksh93.

And update on the other machines fixed that one.   A new Bison
built and everything was fine.

Unix systems are the greatest adventure game the world has seen.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com