Problems installing VLC on FreeBSD6.1

[David Nugent]

Orla McGann wrote:
> Hi there, 
>   I get the following error when I try to portinstall VLC on my machine
> running FreeBSD6.1 Stable:
>
> configure: error: libdirac doesn't appear to be installed on you system.
> ===>  Script "configure" failed unexpectedly.
> Please report the problem to multimedia at FreeBSD.org [maintainer] and attach
> the "/usr/ports/multimedia/vlc/work/vlc-0.8.5/config.log" including the output
> of the failure of your make command. Also, it might be a good idea to provide
> an overview of all packages installed on your system (e.g. an `ls /var/db/pkg`).
>   
Read the error message.  :-)

Near the bottom of the config.log, just before the variables dump, you 
will find the point where configure failed and a message saying why it 
failed.

This is typically because an application requires a more recent version 
of a package it depends on than is currently installed, but the port 
itself couldn't discern between versions (it just checks that it is 
installed and unless lib versions were bumped it may not see that it 
requires updating).  Update any ports that vlc relies on and it should 
build fine (multimedia/vlc builds fine here).

Most bumps in building ports are due to more subtle dependencies than 
the ports system currently caters for. Even when a port's library 
version is bumped, the ports that depend on it will attempt to install 
it as a new port (which will always fail) rather than upgrading the 
existing one. portupgrade will handle this well if you wave the right 
command line options at it (-N -r multimedia/vlc to install the new port 
after upgrading anything it depends on).