Malformed conditional when trying to make

[doug]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2014, Ricky Huang wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> In light of the recent shell shock exploit, I have started patching/update some old systems I own, with "portsnap fetch extract update" command.  There is a machine running "FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE-p3" that throws a "malformed conditional" error whenever I try to make.  A snippet of the error is as follows:
>>
>> Unknown modifier 't'
>>
>> "Makefile", line 57: Malformed conditional (${PORT_OPTIONS:MSTATIC} || defined(NO_DYNAMICROOT) || (defined(NOSHARED) && ${NOSHARED:tl} != "no"))
>> "Makefile", line 61: if-less else
>> "Makefile", line 64: if-less endif
>> Unknown modifier 't'
>>
>> Unknown modifier 't'
>
> I looked up the "releases" section on FreeBSD.org, https://www.freebsd.org/releases/#prior-unsupported, and it shows 9.0 as unsupported.  Fine.  But what I do not understand is why does it allowed my old, unsupported machine to pull from a reposition that it cannot possibly compile?  Shouldn't it stop at the last compile'able rev?
>
> Anyways, I know the box is old and should be upgraded anyways.  So being a FreeBSD noob, what would be the best way to do an in-place upgrade of the system?  There are stuff on the server that I want to keep and a wipe-reinstall is not highly desirable.  Is the update command "freebsd-update"?  Also are there any gotchas that I should look out for?
>
> Thanks for reading.

I do not think your issue is necessarily due to being on a 9.0 system. If you
give more information on what you were building you might get some assistance.
In any case upgrading via freebsd-update is easy and does not require deleting
any programs you are using.

Check out 24.2.3 in the handbook. The following will update to 9.1:

   freebsd-update -r 9.1-RELEASE upgrade

I do not know if skipping releases is okay. In any case the procedure is well
defined and does not take a lot of time.