Newbie - Trouble Installing Gnome2

RW list-freebsd-2004 at morbius.sent.com
Thu Jun 23 16:16:07 GMT 2005


On Thursday 23 June 2005 16:10, cali wrote:
> >            Attempting to fetch from
> > ftp://ftp-FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/distfiles/ghostscript/.
> >            fetch: ghostscripts-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz: local modification
> > does not match remote
> >            => Couldn't find it - please try to retrieve this
> >            => port manually in /usr/ports/distfiles/ghostscript and try
> > again.
> >
> >            ...so, what happened?
>
> I did a search on google for the line "local modification does not match
> remote", one of the responses was from the freebsd-questions mailing list
>
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2003-December/030315.h
>tml
>
> the end result was
>
> >On Mon, 2003-12-29 at 11:28, Michael A. Alestock wrote:
> >> fetch: cvsup-snap-16.1h.tar.gz: local modification time does not match
> >> remote
> >
> >Either
> >
> >a) Remove file from /usr/ports/distfiles and try again
> >
> >or
> >
> >b) Fetch file manually into /usr/ports/distfiles
> >
> >... in addition to (if checksum announced in ports is wrong, which
> >sometimes happen) possibly either a) making new checksum with `make
> >makesum` or b) remove distinfo file.
> >
> >HTH
>
> So the idea is that the remote file failed to match some security criteria
> so it was not downloaded, the resolution is explained correctly by the
> response from HTH repeated above for your convenience.
>
> Google also returned:
>
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2005-June/089503.html
>
> So in the future, I suggest, looking on the mailing list archive first
> because you might find the answer to your question there.
>
IMHO the standard answer is a poor one - probably because most knowledgable 
people on this list have good fast connections, and rarely see this problem. 

When I was on dial-up, I saw this frequently because of regular 
disconnections.  After a while I started manually restarting the downloads. 
Out of nine restarts only one file went on to fail it's MD5 check, and that 
one failed due to an incorrect value stored in the port. After I added the -F  
switch to the fetch command the problem went away without any ill effects. 
There are no security implications to this, your still protected by the MD5 
hash.

If a file does fail an MD5 check, it's worth deleting and redownloading it 
once. But after that IMO it's best to wait for the port to be fixed, unless 
you are sure of the file's provenance, or absolutely can't wait. Distfiles 
come from many different servers with different levels of security. A file 
*might* be failing it's MD5 check because someone has broken into the 
ftp/http server and uploaded modified source.


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