How to fix "broken ports"?

[Marko Käning]

On May 26, 2012, at 3:09 PM, Clemens Lang wrote:
> 
> This kind of output is pretty much useless, because it doesn't tell you
> why the file was marked as broken.
I know, Clemens. Since I saw already with "-d" what caused the breaking I didn't think it would be needed to append the whole list, since I wanted to focus more on automoc and qt4-mac...

> If that is the case and automoc links against qt4-mac it's obvious why
> rev-upgrade marks it as broken (it's dependency library is missing). In
> the first rebuild step any missing dependencies for a broken port should
> be installed, fixing this problem.
Yes, I see your point. But the problem is that automoc is installed and active
---
$ port installed automoc
The following ports are currently installed:
  automoc @0.9.88_3 (active)
$ port deps automoc
Full Name: automoc @0.9.88_3
Build Dependencies:   cmake, pkgconfig
Library Dependencies: qt4-mac
$ port installed qt4-mac
None of the specified ports are installed.
---
without qt4-mac installed.

> I don't think so; automoc would probably not build without qt4-mac
> installed.
Hmm… Perhaps it would install?

> Much more likely is that qt4-mac was installed when
> installing automoc, but was removed afterwards (or marked as broken by
> rev-upgrade and the rebuild failed[1]).
No, qt4-mac wasn't installed...

> In this situation, marking
> automoc as broken and forcing a rebuild is the correct thing to do,
> because the rebuild will install all missing dependencies.
> Theoretically, it would also be possible to install automoc from the
> binary package without having qt4-mac installed, but I don't think
> there's a way to do that with port(1).
…but, now that I think about it: It could be that the the qt4-mac installation was triggered and failed due to an already installed qt3!

> [1] Actually rev-upgrade tries to detect failures while rebuilding and
> should abort, but in some cases does not and continues silently (and I
> haven't found out why that is).
There we are:  My symptoms here seem to indicate that the automoc installation would have proceeded although the qt4-mac installation failed.

OK, good that I asked you.

Greets,
Marko



P.S.: I uninstalled automoc now. A subsequent try to install it again only threw the expected error message that it cannot be installed due to the missing qt4-mac.