Re: upgrading pkgsrc, and variations on the theme of bin-install

[Taylor R Campbell <campbell%mumble.net@localhost>]

   Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 06:39:31 +0700
   From: Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>

   My procedure (quite similar to yours) starts out by deleting (moving
   actually, but the effect is the same) all binary packages that aren't
   up to date.   In your example, the binary package for inputproto-1.4.3.tgz
   would have no longer existed, forcing a recompile from source, which
   would have installed 1.4.4 (or whatever later version is current).

   [...]

   The problem of packages getting built with different options being
   indistinguishable in binary package form is one of the problems pkgsrc
   eventually needs a solution to.

I just ran into this with x11/gtk2 and devel/glib2.  The version of
devel/glib2 with which x11/gtk2 got built, 2.18.0, caused the symbol
g_dgettext to occur in libgtk-x11-2.0.so.  This symbol is new in
2.18.0 since 2.16.3.  When I went to mock up a chroot for a dry run of
the upgrade to 2008Q3, suddenly everything that linked against
libgtk-x11-2.0.so stopped working, complaining about an undefined
symbol g_dgettext, because for whatever bizarre reason, pkg_add
decided to install the glib2-2.16.3nb3.tgz package, rather than the
newer glib2-2.18.0.tgz package.  Although x11/gtk2 would probably have
been perfectly happy to have been built with glib2-2.16.3nb3, if it
was built with glib2-2.18.0, it won't be happy to run with
glib2-2.16.3nb3.

Since binary packages are hard, I think that next time I sha'n't
bother with reusing old ones at all, and instead upgrade entirely from
source.  Now, to clean out my directory of binary packages without
checking versions on three hundred packages by hand...

   That's only partly possible - packages completely built are no problem,
   but a failure 6 hours into an openoffice build (using pkg_comp which
   always does "make clean" success or failure) is going to restart at the
   beginning...

Yes -- let's not ask for ponies here...  Fortunately Open Office is
not one of the packages I need, although I did have to restart a build
of Wireshark with an increased data size ulimit.