On Mon, Oct 04, 2004 at 04:03:19PM -0400, Radhika Sambamurti wrote:
> Hi,
> Sorry about that. My previous email was not really very useful for
> troubleshooting anything.

That's okay.  (^&


> I am not sure what version of pkgsrc I was using, but it was quite old
> (older than Q2).

I don't think of pkgsrc as versioned, they they now do a freeze and CVS
tagging of it.  I think of it in terms of, "I updated pkgsrc recently".
(^&


> 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.

Some people don't much care for "make update".  I personally still
like it, but I am cautious about using it after getting burned a
few times by exactly this problem.


> 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,

I believe that you said that after this problem, you restored an older
pkgsrc---and presumably wiped out all of the intermediary work from
the "make update" that failed.

For future reference, though:

1) When this happens, I always repeat the *exact* same "make update"
(in the same pkg directory) with all output---including stderr---being
sent to a log file.  Then I find out what really broke the build.
Maybe you did this, maybe you didn't.  I'm not quite sure from what
you have said, I offer you this suggestion/advice.  (^&

2) I update pkgsrc via CVS.  If I had seen a "missing patch file",
I'd update the particular package:

  (cd /usr/pkgsrc/databases/openldap && cvs update -PAd)

...and then probably try building just that one broken package:

  (cd /usr/pkgsrc/databases/openldap && make clean && make update)

...and see if it does any better.  If it still fails, I'd post to
a mailing list or file a PR.  (^&

I am assuming, here, that "openldap" is the one package that caused
your whole process to blow up.


> 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 wouldn't advise hacking up pkgsrc files if you update via CVS.  But if
you do go that route (something that I've done sometimes, too), I suggest
making a copy of the pkgsrc directory and hacking the copy.  That way,
there's not interference with CVS, later.  Most (all?) packages
get their package names from items in their Makefile, so if you make a copy
of the directory and hack on the copy, it will install as the "right"
package so that dependancies will still find it.

GNOME, like KDE, is one of those big, heavily cross-referencing packages
for which I do not care much.  Both involve a ton of just-their-own
software, and intertwine with many other libraries that are often used by
a large number of other packages.

Of course, that's my propoganda speech about such things.  If you are
sure that you want---or need---those packages, then one just has to
accept their long and complex dependancies.


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/