MacPorts 2.1.0: Weird rebuild order of "broken ports" !

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 09:40:48PM +0200, Marko Käning wrote:
> But my feeling was right, since - after having issued a rev-upgrade a
> while ago - I see now that something circular is happening.  As you
> can see kdelibs4 and phonon are by now uninstalled and (are getting)
> installed again TWICE!!!  Who knows how this is going to go on now.
> I let the machine head on with this procedure, but I am afraid it's
> leading nowhere sane…

rev-upgrade looks for broken files, finds out which ports these broken
files belong to and starts rebuilding those (while in the first round,
it doesn't actually forcefully rebuild a port, but just makes sure the
port and all of its dependencies are installed). If a rebuild doesn't
fix the problem that caused the port to be rebuilt in the first place
this will cause what you're seeing here, namely a port being rebuilt
over and over.

rev-upgrade should abort on 3rd attempt for any given port. If that
happens, run
	port -d -y rev-upgrade
and use the output to open a ticket. Usually this means this port's
linkage is broken at install time (there is a number of ports that might
actually be hit by this, especially those that move compiled libraries
around without changing the paths referencing these libraries using
install_name_tool). Relative paths in libraries are also known to cause
this (which means ports setting DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH using some wrapper
script will probably be affected).

Often, those problems can be fixed in the Portfile using
install_name_tool or the software's build system.

Feel free to Cc me on any of these tickets if you need clarification as
to why rev-upgrade thinks a binary is broken.

-- 
Clemens Lang