port disaster

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 24, 2007, at 03:12, Anders F Björklund wrote:

> 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 outdated' that is quite routine for me, I ended up with error  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.

Remember we had that situation where trying to install gcc43 would  
install a corrupted port receipt which would completely bork all your  
ports. Maybe something like that happened again?

http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/changeset/29009

What was the last port you updated? If you don't remember, maybe you  
can find out by looking at the last modification date in the port  
receipts.