portsdb and cvsup

Rakhesh Sasidharan rakhesh at rakhesh.com
Mon Aug 6 12:03:51 UTC 2007


On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Arend P. van der Veen wrote:

> Thanks for your story. The only reason we used -U was that we were not sure 
> what they meant got special macros.  The man page for portsdb status that you 
> only use -U if you have special macros in /etc/make.conf.  All we have in 
> there is version information so I think that does not apply to use.

Same here! Didn't make sense to me what the manpage meant by special 
macros. A couple of examples on the net seemed to be using the ''-U'' 
switch and so I too gave it a shot. But it took an awfully long time and 
so I didn't try it again. Since I wasn't doing anything fancy, I figured I 
probably don't have special macros. :)

If you ever figure out what special macros are or in which situations the 
''-U'' switch is useful, please do let me know.

Regards,
Rakhesh

ps. In mailing lists people usually prefer if you were to give your reply 
at the *end* of the quoted post. Makes it easier to read the original 
messages first and then the reply in that context. Just mentioning ...

>
> Thanks again,
> Arend
>
>
> Rakhesh Sasidharan wrote:
>> 
>> On Sun, 5 Aug 2007, Arend P. van der Veen wrote:
>> 
>>> The approach that I had been using was:
>>> 
>>> /usr/local/bin/cvsup  -L 0 /usr/sup/supfile
>>> /usr/local/sbin/portsdb -Uu
>>> 
>>> This had worked great until the emacs22 update.  Now portsdb crashes due 
>>> to the emacs entry in /etc/make.conf.  However, I see very little chatter 
>>> on the lists about this.  I have started to wonder if the bulk of the 
>>> community may be updating their ports differently.  Upon some limited 
>>> research I found that I could use:
>>> 
>>> /usr/local/bin/cvsup  -L 0 /usr/sup/supfile
>>> /usr/local/sbin/portsdb -Fu
>>> 
>>> This work fine for me.  I can then use tools such as pkg_version, 
>>> pkg_delete, portinstall and portupgrade without any problems.
>>> 
>>> My open ended question is what does the rest of the community do to update 
>>> their ports collection?
>>> 
>> 
>> I don't run portsdb at all. :)
>> 
>> What I figured from the portsdb manpages is that if you don't run it 
>> manually then it gets run upon using one of the portupgrade tools. I don't 
>> mind the 30s or so delay that causes and so I don't run portsdb manually.
>> 
>> During my first few days with FreeBSD, however, I used to run ''portsdb 
>> -Fu''. My understanding is that that would fetch the INDEX-6 and update 
>> INDEX-6.db (since I am on FreeBSD 6.x) but I don't see why I should do this 
>> coz the INDEX files are updated when I update the ports tree anyways! (If I 
>> have understood this incorrectly, someone please correct me).
>> 
>> I tried ''portsdb -Uu'' just once. To see what it does. Took a long time 
>> and so I never tried it again. From the manpage I understand that it 
>> creates/ updates the INDEX files by running the ''make index'' command, but 
>> the reasoning behind that didn't make sense to me ...
>> 
>> So that's my story.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Rakhesh
>> 
>


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