Hi,
Sorry about that. My previous email was not really very useful for
troubleshooting anything.
I am not sure what version of pkgsrc I was using, but it was quite old
(older than Q2).
I agree with you that the most grevious thing is that before you know it,
in case of a failure, a lot of my packages were de-installed. It would be
nice to see a small warning of the powers of make update or at least the
consequences of running that command.

As to where things failed...in firefox, make update failed.
In gnome1 x-screensaver had a lot of compile errors. I tried gnome2 and
that failed to build properly due to a missing patch file for openldap,
which is a dependency for evolution-data-server, and I couldnt find the
latest binary pkgs, because current wants really new versions. I did try
commenting out dependencies in the meta-pkgs Makefile, but that really did
not work due to other dependencies. Most of the errors were in gnome and
of course manually trying to de-install and re-install.

I dont know if that helps a little as to where things were breaking.

Radhika
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: make update hell
From:    "Richard Rauch" <rkr@olib.org>
Date:    Mon, October 4, 2004 1:43 pm
To:      "Radhika Sambamurti" <radhika@88thstreet.com>
         netbsd-help@netbsd.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are a few problems of course, but you are not quite clear about
exactly what part of the process bit you.

The most grievous problem, in my eyes, is that if the build fails
on one package in the middle, you wind up with approx. half of your
packages disemboweled on the floor.  Restoring them is a pain.

The second problem is a bit smaller, but is real: The first step that
pkgsrc takes is to delete the current version during an update.  The
package is not available again until the build completes.

(Well, as Jeremy asks: Did it complete successfully while failing
to rebuild any of your old packages?)

A rare problem, which I think is rightly called a bug with the
affected packages, is when your system is trying to rebuild a package that
was removed, but which conflicts with a newer version needed
by some other package.  I've had this happen perhaps once.