portmaster installation trampling on my binary packages???

[Ethan Grammatikidis]

Hi. I'm quite new to FreeBSD. I'm getting a system up & running slowly, working around my chronic fatigue. Today I'm updating for the first time. Base system and pkg update appeared to go well. I haven't rebooted, wanting to get everything done before reboot.

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ports-using.html
This handook page says "ports-mgmt/portmaster is a very small utility for upgrading installed ports. It is designed to use the tools installed with the FreeBSD base system without depending on other ports or databases." That sounds just fine to me, so I did the usual to install portmaster, cd to its directory, and make install clean. 

So far, so good. Then I ran portmaster -a, and it all went pear-shaped. I found myself looking at an endless stream of dialogs; compile-time options for things I don't remember installing as ports. Assuming they're dependencies of some port I installed I accept this, but I'm puzzled because I only remember installing one port (devel/plan9port), and I thought it only built itself and maybe one dependency.

Then it got disturbing: I get a dialog for *xorg* compile-time options. I installed xorg with pkg, a binary package, not a compiled port. I was briefly uncertain, my memory isn't very good, so I checked this:
# date -jr `pkg query %t xorg`                                                 
Sat Mar 11 21:32:41 GMT 2017

What's going on? Is it going to build xorg and all these dozens of other ports too? If so, what about the binary packages I installed? Will they be overwritten? When I installed that one port, it didn't see the need to compile xorg from ports then, so why is it asking me about xorg compile time options now? Why is it asking me to configure literally dozens of other ports I don't care about? That question goes double if it's NOT going to install any of these ports. 

Most of all, why is this massive drain on my energy happening when all I did was ask for the installation of something described in FreeBSD's official handbook as "very small"?

It's now sitting waiting for me to select bash compile time options, a shell I do not care about AT ALL. If it's installed, it's a binary package as a dependency of some other binary package. Can I safely ^C this? Is portmaster normally this insane? If so, why does the handbook recommend it?!


There have been a couple of strange incidents with the ports tree prior to this. I installed from dvd, selecting to install the ports tree at that time. This took long enough that it looked like the biggest part of the installation. When I tried to install that one port, it told me it needed to fetch the port tree. I thought this bizzarre, but ran the suggested command anyway, and after that the port installed just fine. Today I refer to the handbook, and it recommends upgrading the tree using portsnap. Fine, I accept this recommendation... and portsnap then proceeds to whine that it can't work with the default ports tree, it needs *it's* version. (Why is it part of the base system if it can't use the default tree?) After a couple of aeons waiting for portsnap to do its thing and then mk clean just in case I'd installed something else and forgotten about it, I then installed portmaster and tried to use it with the results described above.

-- 
I'm too old to use vi.