Couldn't update

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 4, 2007, at 17:10, Jing Tang wrote:

> Hi again, thanks everyone for the help, but now I've got some more  
> problems:(
>
> I'm on Mac 10.4.10, just installed macport1.5.0. but when i tried  
> to install cairo i got:
>
> jing-tangs-computer:~ Jing$ sudo port install cairo
> Error: Error executing darwin_8: invalid command name  
> "configure.compiler"
> Error: Unable to execute port: Error evaluating variants
>
> I looked online and found someone saying he got the same problem  
> and after updating the problem was solved.

Correct. "configure.compiler" is not part of MacPorts 1.5.0. You need  
the current version, 1.5.2, and you would generally use selfupdate to  
upgrade to that version.

> so i tried to update macport by port selfupdate, but i got:
>
> jing-tangs-computer:~ Jing$ sudo -u root port selfupdate
>
> Error: /opt/local/bin//port: selfupdate failed: Couldn't sync the  
> ports tree: sync failed doing rsync
>
> could anyone give me some ideas please? thanks very much!!!

So perhaps there was a temporary problem accessing the rsync server.  
Please try it again. If that still doesn't work, perhaps your network  
is weird or has a corporate firewall or for some other reason does  
not allow access to rsync servers. If you cannot fix that problem,  
you will have to do without the selfupdate facility and build new  
versions of MacPorts from source yourself. To do so, download the  
1.5.2 source from here:

http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/distfiles/MacPorts/

Decompress it, go into the directory, run ./configure, then make,  
then sudo make install. You should then have the MacPorts 1.5.2  
software.

You will still need to update your ports tree, though, and by default  
that also uses rsync. If that's not working, you may want to install  
subversion, and use subversion to check out a working copy of the  
dports part of the MacPorts subversion repository, and point your / 
opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf at that directory (with a  
file:/// url) instead of at the rsync url like it is by default. Once  
you set that up, "port sync" should work fine in the future to update  
your ports tree.