Jeremy C. Reed wrote:

Hi Jeremy,

> On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Anand Buddhdev wrote:
> 
>>And finally, the system assumed that the build of the new package would
>>succeed, which it did not. In fact, there seems to be a bug at the
>>moment, which causes a build of mysql 4.0.20 to fail. So I started with
>>an update of the pth package, which ended up in a failed build of mysql,
>>leaving me without mysql on my running system :( I had to re-install
>>mysql from a pre-built package from an FTP server.
> 
> Did you ever get the mysql server to build? If not you may want to report
> your problem to tech-pkg.

No, it never did build. I used send-pr to submit it as a bug report. It 
has been assigned ID 27154.

>>The pkgsrc guide recommends a user to type "make update" to update
>>packages. I think the guide should be more conservative, and teach a
>>user to be more cautious, and first type just "make", which will build
>>new packages, but not remove anything. And if all the builds and their
>>dependencies succeed, then proceed with a "make update".
> 
> What was the URL or location of that? I could probably add a note.

The URL is:

http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/software/packages.html

The section is titled "Finding if newer versions of your installed 
packages are in pkgsrc".

>>And anyway, why does "make update" FIRST remove the old package? Would
>>it not make sense to first build the new package(s), and if all the
>>builds succeed, then to proceed with deleting the old packages and
>>replacing them with new ones? That makes for a very small package
>>unavailability window.
> 
> It needs to update the dependencies before it can rebuild any software
> using them. It can't easily keep around the previous installed software if
> any libraries and other dependencies are changed.

I suppose that is true. In that case, pkgsrc is perhaps not as easy to 
use as I initially believed. Courtney Spencer's suggestion about a 
sanboxed pkgsrc is a rather clever idea, but it is still a work-around 
for a serious problem, which I am sure many people often come across.