portmanager endlessly looping in x11

[Jerry]

On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:41:32 -0400
Chuck Robey <chuckr at telenix.org> articulated:

> On 08/26/10 01:17, jhell wrote:
> > On 08/25/2010 21:27, Chuck Robey wrote:
> >> I have an interesting thing here: I seem to have found an endless
> >> loop in portmanager.  It's *entirely* possible that I'm myself
> >> causing this, so I'll explain, and if you can come up with any
> >> hints, I'll be happy to test them, because I really do like using
> >> portmanager.
> >>
> 
> >
> > CC:<The maintainer>  of ports-mgmt/portmanager is a good start.
> > Maybe He/She can give you some insight of the working of
> > portmanager. I am not sure how portmanager keeps the package
> > database up to date but sometimes dependencies can get messed up in
> > the database that can cause a loop and if not handled correctly by
> > the upgrade process can cause a lot of grief. In portmaster you
> > could be using --check-depends and in portupgrade you could use
> > -Ffu but you don't seem to be using any of the suggested ports-mgmt
> > upgrade utilities so good luck. ``emphasis on portmaster'' --
> > written by dougb@, so you know it works!.
> 
> The problem I saw, I'm pretty sure is caused by a discrepancy (in
> portmanager) between how deeply it looks for dependencies versus how
> deeply it looks it looks to decide to actually rebuild those
> discovered dependencies.  Merely noting the need to rebuild seems not
> to be the same thing as actually doing it.  It found things maybe 3
> levels deep, but if it's less than 2 levels down, it won't rebuild
> it, it'll merely realize that it *should* do it.  I switched to using
> portmaster (this looks alike, I'm making no mistake tho, moved from
> portmanager to portmaster) which doesn't seem to have this uneveness,
> so while it takes a whole lot longer to work than portmanager (it
> uses slow but sure shell utils for it's databases) it really does a
> far more reliable job of things.  You could get to rely on it.
> 
> It sure took me a good while to track down the reasons that
> portmanager was fixing on, in deciding that something was out of
> date, and the frustration was sufficient to cause me to forgive the
> way that portmaster is much more slow. One really big irritation was
> how portmanager would rebuild something completely successfully 3
> times, but since it would fail its dependency scans, it never would
> recognize that any of those looping apps had been rebuilt.  Very
> puzzling, until I realized about the dependency problems.
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Portmanager did have a nasty bug that involved looping. It was fixed
ages ago though. Are you running the latest version; i.e., "0.4.1_9" on
your system? Run "portmanager -v" to confirm.

Without the '-p' option, portmanager only looks 1 level deep. with the
'-p' option, it will search the entire dependency chain. I always use
the '-p' option and never experience any problems described by you.

-- 
Jerry ✌
FreeBSD-Ports.user at seibercom.net

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