Ports update gone badly wrong

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org wrote:
> I think I have made a horrendeous mess of my workstation.  I have been
> running 5.3 with no problem, and then I tried to csvup the ports
> files, using the following section in ports-supfile.  Note I didn't
> change the release tag!

That shouldn't have been a problem.

> I updated a few of the ports, including
> Evolution and Firefox, and had trouble with missing libraries, such
> as libgthread .. 400 having been rename to ..600..
>
> The machine now feels less stable than an old version of Windows.
> Things like Tk.pm and other Perl modules no longer work, and won't
> reinstall.  I had to copy over the missing libraries for Evolution
> and Firefox from another machine.
>
> Any advice for recovery, other than a re-installation and fresh
> start? What should I do next time?
>
>

What I do is this, I write a build sheet up while I'm installing the
system that lists everything that I do to the system.

In your case if you knew what ports you had installed the ideal thing
would have been to go to each of them, do a 'make deinstall, make clean'
then
cvs update your ports tree, then go back to each port and do a 'make
install' again.
Obviously you back up your config files, eh? :-)

Here's a suggestion for you.  Just do a rm -r on /usr/ports, then go to
your install
CD and reinstall the original ports tree that you had first installed (i
assume
the ports tree you were using was the one from the release CD right) then
go into each port, do a make deinstall, then cvsup ports, then make
install
again.

If however your ports tree was something in between the one supplied on
the
release CD, and the one you have now, then good luck.  You could get the
system
back together if you meticulously go through the cvs repository for
ports, go
back to the older versions of stuff, manually remove their install files.
But
that is hours of time.  Your best off now just backing your config files
and
data up, then reformatting and reinstalling.

One hint for you - when installing again, DON'T install the X-windows.
Instead,
install the base system, cvsup ports, then build freetype2 and followed
by xorg, followed by firefox.  The reason is that firefox requires the
newest
version of freetype2, and the X-windows that comes on the 5.3 CD has an
older
version.

Ted