Build problem - help wanted

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <4EA2458E.5040707 at FreeBSD.org>, 
Doug Barton <dougb at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

>> As I understand it, portinstall and portupgrade are just two faces of the
>> same coin, the only difference being that portinstall does nothing if the
>> specified port is already installed whereas portupgrade does nothing if
>> the specifioed port is NOT already installed.
>
>Ah, I wasn't aware that portinstall was part of portupgrade. In any case
>I think your assumption about what portupgrade does is wrong. My
>understanding is that by default it will upgrade ports that are
>dependencies of the ports that you are upgrading or installing.

If by that you mean that portupgrade normally unpgades things that depend
upon the port mentioned in the command line when portupgrade is invoked,
then all I can say is that in my experience this is not correct, and that
although portupgrade _can_ be made to do that, one has to use the special
-r option to make it do that (which I have not used).

>> In short, the problem isn't with the specific port maintenance tools I'm
>> using.  Rather, the problem is, as I've been saying, an imperfection in
>> the actual dependencies list for the x11-toolkits/gtk20 port.  (The de-
>> pendencies need to force a build & install of some specific version of
>> gobject-introspection which is more recent than 0.9.12... probably 0.10.x.
>> Otherwise, cryptic build failure of gtk may ensue, and has, apparently,
>> for myself and numerous other people.)
>
>I'm not sure you're right about that. I think that if you had used
>portupgrade you probably would have seen the result we're looking for
>(upgrading gobject-introspection first).
>
>In any case, I'm *certain* that you would have seen the proper results
>if you had used portmaster, so perhaps you should consider giving it a try.

I'm sorry, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to not de-install
all fo the ports that I've so tediously built & installed, overe several days,
just to perform this experiment.