Updating Ports

[epilogue]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:17:09 -0600
"Cody Holland" <cholland at redmoonbroadband.com> wrote:

> After running cvsup, I then ran portdb -Uu and received the following
> error.
> 
> Updating the ports index ... Generating INDEX.tmp - please
> wait..gnustep-slideshow-0.3: "/usr/ports/graphics/slideshowkit"
> non-existent -- dependency list incomplete
> ===> graphics/gnustep-slideshow failed
> *** Error code 1
> 1 error
> 
> *** Error code 1
> 
> Stop in /usr/ports.
> *** Error code 1
> 
> Stop in /usr/ports.
> failed to generate INDEX!
> portsdb: index generation error
> 
> How do I fix this?

hello cody,

note:  this is not a fix, but an alternative:

rather than building your copy of INDEX locally, you can

	cd /usr/ports && make fetchindex

this will download a precompiled copy INDEX.  while this one is not
guaranteed to *exactly* match your local tree (although it might), it is
sufficiently fresh that you are not likely to bump into any INDEX
related problems.  if i had to guess as to its reliability, i would
say that it works 99.978592% of the time.

this precompiled copy is rebuilt by the servers every 2 hours (or less),
so if you ever do bump into a problem, you can just wait a bit and pull
down a newer version (or build it locally).

the advantage you ask?  well, downloading the INDEX takes only the time
required for your connection to pull down a ~700 k file, whereas
building INDEX locally usually takes 30-60 minutes, not to mention,
quite a few CPU cycles.

anyhoo.  food for thought.


cheers,
epi