Ports update gone badly wrong

Mike Jeays Mike.Jeays at rogers.com
Sun May 1 19:57:08 PDT 2005


On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 17:44, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 04:37:10PM -0400, Mike Jeays wrote:
> > I think I have made a horrendeous mess of my workstation.  I have been
> > running 5.3 with no problem, and then I tried to csvup the ports files,
> > using the following section in ports-supfile.  Note I didn't change the
> > release tag!  I updated a few of the ports, including Evolution and
> > Firefox, and had trouble with missing libraries, such as libgthread ..
> > 400 having been rename to ..600..
> > 
> > The machine now feels less stable than an old version of Windows. 
> > Things like Tk.pm and other Perl modules no longer work, and won't
> > reinstall.  I had to copy over the missing libraries for Evolution and
> > Firefox from another machine.
> > 
> > Any advice for recovery, other than a re-installation and fresh start?
> > What should I do next time?
> 
> Use portupgrade to update your ports.  What you did wrong was updated
> a port that provides a library without updating the ports that depend
> on that library.
> 
> Kris

Thanks for the varying replies.  I tried running portupgrade -arR, and
it seems to have worked quite well - almost all the ports are now up to
date, and the system seems to work properly.  It took over 24 hours,
partly because some ports stop and ask questions, and the process needs
occasional attention.

I think I will manage as I am for a while, and either install 5.4RC, or
wait for the 5.4 release, which should be in a few weeks.



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