I had TeX set up more or less to my liking, but wanted to install
something which wanted a newer ncurses (I believe that it was KOTH (an
artillery gamea)---why it needs ncurses, I dunno).  So, I did a ``make
update'' in the ncurses dir last night.  It set about recursively deleting
packages that depended upon it.  One package that got zapped was teTeX,
because its config tool uses ncurses.

Then it built the new ncurses (all was hoopy), and then began trying to
rebuild the packages that it'd deleted (I assume that old configuration
options were irretrievably lost by this time).  This brings me to my first
point:

  Is there someway to get the package system not to wipe dependant
  packages (or else to confirm before doing so)?


Unfortunately, my network link had dropped after fetching the ncurses
sources.  So the first package to be re-installed (cdk, I think) was
unable to find a local tar file; it tried to fetch over the non-existant
network, and failed with an unknown host.  At that point, the entire
process ground to a halt.  I have to show for it an updated ncurses and
the ability to build KOTH, plus an unknown number of dependant packages
removed.  This is Not Good.

I looked in /var and /tmp, but couldn't find any obvious leftovers from
the package built process, so I have no idea how many recursively deleted
items I will have to install.  (There were only about 3 direct
dependancies on ncurses, but I believe that taking out teTeX in turn
removed gtexinfo...though the /usr/pkg/.../info dir is still in place, and
things like GNU EMACS and the standalone info program are still there.)
That brings me to my second question:

  Does ``make update'' in pkgsrc create enough logging/tracking info
  anywhere that it (or I) can figure out how to pick up where it dropped
  the ball?  If not, I suppose that this probably qualifies as something
  that should be send-pr'ed.  (^&


After having a bit of a fit, I finally got teTeX reinstalled.  (I'm not
sure if the culprit was some left-over files that weren't fully deleted
from the original installation, or if it was because of some changes to
teTeX that left it temporarily broken; I run sup and rooted out all of the
old teTeX files that I could see hadn't been removed by pkg_delete and it
seems to have more or less taken care of things.)


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  --rkr@rkr.kcnet.com