Failing to retrieve source tarballs for anything.

[John Kennedy]

On Sun, Sep 02, 2018 at 07:58:16AM +1200, Jonathan Chen wrote:
> On 2 September 2018 at 05:25, Alex McKeever <alex.mckeever at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > After compiling PKG, when I go to ports to compile anything (my eMac can run FreeBSD but not modern Linux due to the version of the Radeon GPU) it fails to retrieve any of the source tarballs for any of the software, desktop environments etc. I would like help to fix this, as I???d like to run something current.
> 
> How old is your ports tree? It it up to date? What sort of problems
> are you seeing in fetching the port sources?
> 
> Since no one else has reported any problems, it is most likely
> something to do with your local environment.

Alex, despite what the documentation says, I wouldn't try to build too much
using the regular make methods (or portmaster).  There are a number of
dependencies that are incompatible that you can skate by if you use packages,
synth or poudriere.  Unless you're going to heavily customize your options,
I'd stick with the simplest, packages, until you have a reason not to.

FreeBSD 11.2 is stable...  what version are you running?  If you're running
something really old, packages may no longer be offered and you should try to
upgrade, but that is a different problem.  11.1 and 10.4 still have some life.

As Jonathan noted, having an up-to-date port tree is also important.  If
it's too old, you may be trying to grab tarballs that no longer exist.
Have you looked at chapter 4 of the FreeBSD handbook?

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html

One way to update the sources is via the portsnap fetch/extract/update:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html

The "binary packages" method is described here:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/pkgng-intro.html

If you're using packages, and you "pkg upgrade", you'll see something like:

	root at rpi3:~ # pkg upgrade
	Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
	FreeBSD repository is up to date.
	All repositories are up to date.
	Checking for upgrades (1 candidates): 100%
	Processing candidates (1 candidates): 100%
	Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting)
	Your packages are up to date.

My home ISP does something wonky with their DNS and I have some issues with
connecting to some resources, but that is trivially solved by changing my
DNS server.  That typically manifests as unreachable sites or unresolvable
hostnames, which might match your symptoms depending on the "fail."