portmaster -af fails due to dead port - HELP

[William F. Dudley Jr.]

On 07/02/2015 10:35 PM, kpneal at pobox.com wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 02, 2015 at 05:20:19PM -0400, William Dudley wrote:
>> I don't understand if this is a problem with arj or autoconf, but I don't
>> want to delete arj, because
>> other packages depend on it, and I don't want to delete them.  I tried "pkg
>> lock arj" and that didn't
>> seem to do anything, in that portmaster -af still wants to upgrade arj.
>>
>> Now what?  How do I get portmaster -af to ignore arj?  Or how do I fix
>> whatever the complaint is
>> about arj?
> I haven't been following this thread closely, but I wanted to ask: Is there
> a good reason to use portmaster?
>
> With pkg it is easy to get and use binary packages.
>
> And with poudriere it is fairly straightforward to do bulk builds of
> packages without touching your regular installed system. It even lets you
> use custom options for particular ports if you like.
>
> I've started updating /usr/ports, running poudriere, and then upgrading
> with pkg all daily. It's much more reliable than messing with the installed
> software I'm currently attempting to use while upgrading it.
>
The reason I'm going through this pain is because I'm following the 
instructions here:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.3R/installation.html

And it says "users of systems being upgraded from FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE or 
earlier will be prompted by freebsd-update(8) to rebuild all third-party 
applications (e.g., ports installed from the ports tree)".  So I need to 
rebuild the ports.

I'd just as soon replace all the ports that I've built with pre-built 
packages; this is so much
more complicated than updating packages on Linux, where it's absolutely 
trivial.  But I like
having a FreeBSD machine as mail and web server, so I stick with it 
despite the difficulty.

Is there a *simple* way to just replace all the ports I've built with 
the packaged equivalents?

Right now I can't get past this:

prompt> portmaster -af -x arj -x faad2 -x libutempter -x ruby -x tcl

<lots of stuff deleted for brevity>

===>>> Returning to update check of installed ports

         ===>>> No origin available for tcl~pkg-renamed~9E62-8.4.19_3,1


===>>> Cannot continue
===>>> Aborting update

and it craps out complaining about tcl, even though I told it to ignore 
tcl.  And I pkg deleted
tcl and tk.  And still it complains about tcl.

I've just read a bit of the docs for poudriere and it looks like another 
nightmare.  It wants me
to use ZFS, for starters, which means more disks that I don't have room 
for.  I have
zero confidence that poudriere will work without throwing tons of 
errors.   I don't
need complicated right now, I need simple.  I just want to update the 
machine from
8.4 to 9.3, update the packages, and then ignore it for a few weeks to 
months.  The reason
my ports are so out of date is because it's such a nightmare to keep 
them updated.
I hate working with ports and packages -- it's always a descent into 
dependency hell.

Bill Dudley