Weird portmaster behaviour -- everything fails to install

[Andrew Reilly]

Problem solved!

In case anyone is interested, or has encountered a similar
problem, I believe that my problem was that somehow my
/var/db/pkg directory had a whole pile of near-duplicate entries
corresponding to port revisions.  Portmaster was checking the
installed version against the MD5 hashes in the "old" version
+CONTENTS file, and they weren't matching.  I assume that I
acquired all of these out-of-date pkg entries through a backup
restore mishap: I've been having gmirror issues lately (not
gmirror's fault, I think -- just a series of dodgy hard drives.)

All is good again.  No duplicate db/pkg entries at last, and
portmaster runs to completion as intended.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 08:24:03AM +1000, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> I've spent the weekend doing a ports catch-up: there seems to
> have been a lot of activity recently!  It's taking a long time
> at least partly because portmaster doesn't seem to be "doing the
> right thing" all of a sudden: it will happily trace the
> dependencies and build the first superceded port, but fails to
> re-install it.   On every occsaion this weekend, it gets to
> ===> Installing for foo-0.123_2
> ===> Generating temporary packing list
> ===> Checking if graphics/foo already installed
> ===>  foo-0.123_2 is already installed
>      You may wish to "make deinstall" and blah, blah, blah...
> 
> Of course it's installed, that's why I'm running portmaster!
> 
> So I go into the directory, run make deinstall reinstall clean,
> and that goes without a hitch.  Restart portmaster -uBd -a and
> half an hour later it will fail in the same way, and I'll have
> to do the same dance.
> 
> It's most likely something dumb that I've got misconfigured: can
> anyone suggest to me where I should look?