gretl Install Failure, and several dependencies

[b. f.]

John B. Stubblebine wrote:
> I have been having trouble trying to install "ports/math/gretl" on PC-BSD.

...

>QUESTION:  Could the use of prerelease 7.2 cause some confusion about
>what portsnap and portupgrade need to do??  I have done a fresh
>"portsnap" before beginning the "gretl" portupgrade.

This should not confuse either portsnap or portupgrade on regular
FreeBSD.  You should not be using the "-k" flag with portupgrade,
except in a very few cases, because most of the time it will just lead
to more problems.  Instead, if you run into a problem installing a
port, you should try to resolve that problem before proceeding.
Otherwise you will often get a bunch of successive failures, many of
them arising from the same source, and waste a lot of time -- as in
this case.

I recommend that you make sure that a stale ports tree or index is not
causing problems,  by removing /usr/ports (preserving your distfiles,
of course), downloading a fresh ports tarball and INDEX file from one
of the servers, and unpacking them into /usr/ports.

Then try clean rebuilds of math/mpfr and lang/gcc44, which, according
to your logs, seems to be the source of your problems:

make -C /usr/ports/math/mpfr deinstall clean install &&
make -C /usr/ports/math/mpfr clean &&
make -C /usr/ports/lang/gcc44 deinstall clean install &&
make -C /usr/ports/lang/gcc44 clean

If you prefer packages, you could use "make deinstall clean ... &&
pkg_add  ..." for each instead.  But you should make sure that you are
not using stale packages, because there were some recent changes to
all Fortran-related ports, and you want only packages that were built
after these changes were made -- in particular, use no Fortran-related
packages built before 27 Sept of this year.

If this fails, you will know that it is a problem with those ports or
one of their dependencies, or with the fact that you are using PC-BSD,
and you should tell us about the failure.  If it succeeds, then you
can try to resume your installation of math/gretl.

>QUESTION:  Will gretl run correctly once I get all its dependencies to
>install??  I am guessing (hoping?) that this will work

We'll have to see what happens after you are able to successfully
install it. The fact that you are using PC-BSD could complicate the
matter.

>QUESTION:  With this complex a package/port should I give up on PC-BSD?
>Would FreeBSD-7.2 RELEASE with all its updates be more likely to be
>successful for gretl to install and run?

It would certainly be easier to use regular FreeBSD if you plan to use
many non-PC-BSD ports or packages, because fewer things could go
wrong.  Whether you switch or not depends upon your needs, and those
of any other people using that computer.

b.