port disaster

[Anders F Björklund]

Jyrki Wahlstedt wrote:

> For some reason yesterday, as I was doing 'port selfupdate; port 
> outdated' that is quite routine for me, I ended up with error message 
> saying something like: port installed failed, list element ended with 
> } instead of space (the exact wording escapes me at the moment).
> However, the result is that I am informed I have no ports installed! 
> Probably I have to install all ports again from scratch, which takes 
> time that could be used more productively and is a RPITA?! How could 
> this kind of situation be avoided or if disaster hits, how could the 
> ports be restored? The problem is to find all packages that are 
> installed and active, and to find the configuration (i.e. variants) 
> used to build them.
> I'd hope a new selfupdate could solve the problem, but I am not 
> optimistic.

It's possible it is "just" your port index that is broken (if you are 
using SVN this happens all the time), so try rebuilding this first by 
running `portindex` in your dports directory. If you are using rsync, 
PortIndex should be updated too - so then it's something else.

--anders