Build problem - help wanted

[Doug Barton]

On 10/20/2011 03:39, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> In message <4E9F9C2B.40808 at FreeBSD.org>, 
> Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 10/19/2011 20:13, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>>> Still, to whoever the maintainer of gtk is... Shouldn't you, ya know, fix up
>>> the port dependencies?  You know, so that gtk depends on having
>>> gobject-introspection-0.10.x installed?
>>
>> I don't know enough about the specifics to answer that question. However
>> in general the FreeBSD ports in general don't support partial updates.
>> The assumption is that all of your ports are up to date. We do our best
>> to support as much backwards compatibility as we can, but you're going
>> to have less trouble generally if you keep everything up to date.
> 
> 
> Thank you for your response, but it is clear that you dont' understand how
> the problem I reported came about.  So please allow me to explain.
> 
> I am just simply trying to bring up a fresh new 8.2-RELEASE system and trying
> to get a bunch of ports I need to have installed on it installed.
> 
> To do this, I have run either portinstall or portupgrade on something like
> 30-40 different ports of things I need.

You left out portmaster. :)  But seriously, you didn't mention 'update
your ports tree' in that list of things to do. It's far more likely that
a stale ports tree would have caused this problem than the specific tool
you used to do your installation.

> ...
> It would seem that one of those, or perhaps something I installed from pre-
> built packages off the distribution CD stealthily installed a stale and
> unusable version of this gobject-introspection thing when I wasn't looking...

Yeah, that could do it too.

> In short, it is all well and good for you to admonish me

You used the word "admonish" in your message several times, as if you
believe I'm somehow telling you that you did something wrong. I assure
you that's not the case. I was simply trying to help you understand how
to improve the situation for the future.

> to keep all of my
> installed packages up-to-date[1], but in this case, the failure of the GTK
> build, and specifically the rather entirely unhelpful and uninformative
> way that it died (a) was not in any sense my fault and (b) was, I think,
> more a symptom of bad engineering in the port that it was a symptom of
> any person or group of people not having run around and made sure that
> everything was spic and span and ready for military inspection prior to
> even trying to build the port.

I snipped the rest of your message since it's more of the same. I
specifically said that I wasn't disagreeing with you on the specifics,
you could very well be right. That said, tools like portupgrade or
portmaster will help you make sure that the lower-level dependencies are
up to date before building the things that depend on them. You might
consider using one of them.


Doug

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