Build problem - help wanted

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <4EA22C60.8080207 at FreeBSD.org>, 
Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

>> 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.

Well, so this time _I_ must plead guilty of ass-uming.

I assumed that people would implicitly understand that I wouldn't be asking
the kind of question I was asking unless I had just recent done a "portsnap
fetch extract", which in fact I did do within 18 hours prior to posting about
the gtk build failure.

In short, yes, my ports tree was and is reasonably up-to-date.

>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.

In general, yes.  But in this specific case, no.

>> ...
>> 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.

I am glad we agree,

>> 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.

You said something like "Make sure all of you ports are up to date", and it
did sound a bit dismissive... sort of like something that somebody would say
to a newbie to make him just go away quitely with his head down.

I may be dumb.  I may often make mistakes.  But I'm not a newbie.

>I assure
>you that's not the case. I was simply trying to help you understand how
>to improve the situation for the future.

Well, then I'm sorry if _I_ seemed to be flying off.  But then again, as I
said, even taken as something well-meaning, your advice was not altogether
helpful due to its circular nature.  I mean in effect the the essence of
your final bit of advice seemed to be ``Keep all of your ports up to date
at all times and then you won't ever have any build problems while attempting
to keep your ports up to date.''

I assume that by now you have grasped the circularity.

>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.

Yes, they will, at least in those cases where the port maintainer has properly
listed _all_ of the actual dependencies (which seems not to be the case, at
present, for gtk).

>You might consider using one of them.

I _was_ in fact using portinstall at the time the build failure I first wrote
about occured.  As I understand it, portinstall performs all of the same auto-
matic forced pre-builds of dependences as portupgrade does.  Are you asserting
that that is NOT the case?