Frustration

[Scott Bennett]

     On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 13:45:02 +0100, "Joao Barros" <joao.barros at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>On 6/30/06, Fernando Pinguelo <pinguelo at comcast.net> wrote:
>> I am writing to you because I need to vent. I have tried installing version 5.3 of FreeBSD on a Pentium III machine. I thought I succeeded in doing it so, but when I tried to build xOrg I realized that I did not have all the ports installed and that some other dependencies were also missing. I realized then that the installation had not been as successful as I first thought.

      First off, a note to Fernando Pinguelo:  putting entire paragraphs onto
single lines of text makes it a real pain to edit replies properly.  Please
avoid the practice when posting to mailing lists.

>> So, I tried to re-install the ports from the CD, since I didn't have an Internet connection to that machine. Well, I kept getting more and more hardware/software errors. I then tried to upgrade FreeBSD to version 6.1. And that was what I did; I tried.

     My guess is that Fernando has pointed out the source of his troubles in
the first sentence on the above line of text.  Installing the ports tree from
the CD-R/RW does *not* mean installing the *source code* of the ports tree.
What is actually installed is a partial directory tree with a few small files
in the top directory of each port.  Among other matters, these files contain
the information the ports subsystem needs to *locate and download (i.e., via
fetch(1))* a recent version of the source code for each port, as well as to
download and apply any patches made available since that version of the source
code was finalized for placement onto one or more servers.  In other words,
without an Internet connection, he can't get the source code in order to
build it.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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