Portupgrade fails to upgrade after using portsnap

[Donald J. O'Neill]

On Saturday 18 March 2006 08:06, Jez Hancock wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> For a long time I've been using cvsup and portupgrade to update the
> ports tree once a week; this has worked well for years now.  Recently
> though I changed to using portsnap to update the ports tree, still
> using portupgrade once a week to update the ports.  I followed the
> method outlined in the handbook more or less for upgrading using
> portsnap, essentially running a cronjob:
>
> portsnap cron && portsnap update && portupgrade -arRF && pkg_version
> -v -I -l "<"
>
> to grab and extract the latest port snapshot, fetch any newer port
> distfiles/tarballs and then report by mail what ports are out of
> date.
>
> This worked well for a few weeks up until Feb 25th - since then not a
> single out of date port has been reported and 'portupgrade -arR'
> fails to upgrade anything. I thought this might have been to do with
> the recent ports freeze, though checking now I see that only went on
> from the start of March...
>
> I've changed back to use cvsup and the old method - basically 'cvsup
> -g -L2 supfile && cd /usr/ports && make fetchindex && portsdb -u' -
> but still no joy.  I was convinced it was the ports db files that
> were out of synch and thought this might do the trick to fix the
> problem, but unfortunately no - if I view the resulting INDEX file
> from this procedure I can see there are ports out of date as well,
> it's just 'portupgrade -arR' etc refuses to find any updates.
>
> Questions then:
>
> What could the problem be?
> For future reference what is the best way to purge the ports system
> of out of date db files and regenerate them all so 'portupgrade
> -arRi' will work?
>
> Cheers.
> --
> Jez Hancock
> _______________________________________________

Doing a little better job of reading the man page would help. While it 
tells you how to set up a cronjob, it also tells you this is a bad 
idea.

You ran the cronjob, which succeeded, but failed to update the ports 
tree because it had nothing to update it with. If you had ever run 
portsnap manually, I think you would have set-up your cronjob a little 
differently.

Don