Long delays in 'pkg upgrade' and other mysteries ..

[Ian Smith]

Dear Hive,

On 9.3-PRE world June 26th, I converted the 700-odd packages originally 
installed from the 9.2-R dvd1_memstick, plus a handful subsequently, to 
pkgng three days ago.  That seemed to go smoothly, and didn't take long.

So today I ran 'pkg update' to sync it up, then 'pkg upgrade' to upgrade 
all packages.  That was almost 4 hrs ago and ever since I've watched it 
fetch 657 packages to /var/cache/pkg/All, one about every 16-17 seconds, 
doing apparently nothing meanwhile.

I'm getting 3-400KB/s on small packages, taking one or two seconds each, 
and 5-700KB/s on larger ones.  Then it sits, top showing pkg in kqwait 
for around 15-17 seconds, gkrellm the busiest thing running at 2-3%, few 
percent for Xorg, KDE etc - basically idle - until (what looks like) a 
sleep expires, pkg springs into action for maybe a second doing the next 
fetch, then it goes back to sleep.  Why would this be?

During that ~4 hours the sqlite db was locked, I couldn't 'pkg info' to 
see where it was up to, or 'pkg which' to hunt down a lost link related 
to an earlier unsuccessful 'portmaster --packages www/firefox' run which 
may have screwed things up, after which I thought upgrading all packages 
the best idea, and certainly worth a try to gain confidence with pkg :)

But no; after fetching ~900MB to cache, it spewed a large number (eg):

pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook-5.0_1 conflicts on 
/usr/local/share/xml/docbook/5.0/xsd/xml.xsd with: - docbook-xml-5.0_2

After that, the last 'pkg: WARNING:' line above .. nothing.  Not a word.  
Just the prompt.  Too many errors?  No apparent changes to any pkgs nor 
the database, though the earlier portmaster shows some installed.

That was the last of > 2000 lines of these msgs, for installed packages 
qt4-*-4.84, perl5.14-5.14.4_7 and docbook-5.0_1 mostly, but I lost lots 
off the top; python27-2.7.6_4 came up too.  I suspect portmaster earlier 
managed to update these, but not register them?

Ah yes, later, perhaps I see; I should have upgraded portmaster before 
using it, the older one was doing an all-source upgrade :(  And likely 
trying to register upgrades using the old package_tools too .. there 
still be a few dragons afoot ..

Later; I ran a second 'pkg upgrade' inside script(1), so if anyone might
benefit from seeing a 170KB list of conflicts, just ask.

So what should I do now, short of starting from scratch?

cheers, Ian  (please cc me)