port disaster

[Jyrki Wahlstedt]

On 24.10.2007, at 11.19, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> 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 outdated' that is quite routine for me, I ended up with error  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.
>
Well,
a new selfupdate solved the problem, I am relieved… It would be  
interesting to look for the cause of this, but unfortunately I don't  
have time enough to do that, so I just hope it doesn't happen anymore…

!
! Jyrki Wahlstedt
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