Problems using portupgrade to recompile all ports

[Jan Grant]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, Scott I. Remick wrote:

> So I'm upgrading my 5.1R desktop to 5.2R. Used cvsup, followed the
> instructions in UPGRADING, did a custom kernel, etc etc. That part went
> fine, no probs.
>
> I noticed some of my daemons (from ports) seemed a bit annoyed though upon
> booting up 5.2. I tried using portupgrade -Rf on them individually, and
> then all was well. I decided then that it'd be best to do everything (-Raf)
> to play it safe. I've done this before.
>
> So it finally finished last night, but not really... about 132 ports were
> failed/skipped. My problem is figuring out the most efficient way to deal
> with it from here. LAST time I did a portupgrade -Raf I had a much smaller
> number failed/skipped, and what I did was work out the dependency tree for
> the remaining ones by hand using pkg_info -R and -r, figure out the order,
> and do a portupgrade -f on each in the proper order. This was to avoid
> rebuilding stuff already built on the first -Raf pass, and multiple times
> over (since I was taking care of each remaining one individually). Seems to
> me that if 50 of those 132 are X apps and I do a portupgrade -Rf on each,
> I'll be rebuilding XFree86 50 times. Hence the need to work out the install
> order by-hand based upon dependencies and only use -f. But I don't see that
> as practical this time around with so many left to do.
>
> So... my ultimate question is: how do you pros handle situations like this?
> Is there a trick I'm missing?

Do you know why the failure happened? The most frequent cause of this
when I've encountered the problem is that a distfile could not be
fetched. I tend to try to avoid that these days by prefetching the
distfiles prior to a build (ie, while I'm around to sort out problems
manually rather than overnight).

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
If it's broken really badly - don't fix it either.