portupgrade system destruction?

Andrew Sinclair syncman at optusnet.com.au
Tue Jan 4 18:35:26 PST 2005


Kris Kennaway wrote:

>On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 04:04:02PM +0000, Andrew Sinclair wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Portupgrade makes a mess at the best of times. A recursive portupgrade 
>>is not so clever about dependencies, particually on a live system. On 
>>occasion, it even seems to tamper with core libraries which is what 
>>would have occured in your case.
>>    
>>
>
>Can you provide some evidence of these claims?  I'm suspicious :-)
>
>Kris
>
No, I can only tell you that I tried it, and stopped using it some time
ago because of similar problems. Keep in mind I said, "seems to tamper
with."

    I had an issue where some kind of linux centric library (not
libc-client) was no longer available and several system utilities
refused to start up. I tried reinstalling linux_base but that didn't fix
it. Turned out it was a subtle change in the ports collection that
required a little more than a [cvsup; portupgrade] to fix. On previous
occasions, it attempted to upgrade 10x as many ports & dependencies as I
wanted. It was more work than a manual deinstall, cvsup, reinstall. I
came to the conclusion that automated tools are a poor excuse for not
reading /usr/ports/UPDATING   ;-)

    I usually research these problems before I say anything but figuring
that Mr Anderson required immediate assistance, I risked using the
infamous Ass-U-Me technique to speculate about the problem. Had I have
known you'd be on his case the same day, I would not have said anything.

    By the way, sorry if I offended you with the, "with all due
respect," quip Eric. I wasn't sure how to write that in a way that
didn't seem offensive.   :-)



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