port selfupdate failed (on Lion)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 4, 2011, at 12:48, robert delius royar wrote:

> Thu, 4 Aug 2011 (17:57 +0200 UTC) Rainer Müller wrote:
> 
>> On 2011-08-04 17:40 , Johannes Ruscheinski wrote:
>>> Error: /opt/local/bin/port: port selfupdate failed: Error installing
>>> new MacPorts base: shell command failed
>>> 
>>> I assume this is a common problem on Lion?   If not, I'd be happy to
>>> provide whatever logs are needed to troubleshoot this.
>> 
>> No, MacPorts is supposed to work on Lion.
>> 
>> Please run 'sudo port -d selfupdate' to see the debug output. It should
>> indicate what exactly failed.
>> 
>> Rainer
> 
> I see the same problem on SL and did for 2.00. The problem is that after the error `port -v` reports that the new version is installed, and repeating the command `port selfupdate` with '-vd' does not provide any useful answers because selfupdate does not recognize that there was an error. Finally, the output says to see the log, but there are only logs for individual packages in /opt/local/var/macports/logs. I could not find another place where the install logs are stored.
> 
> Would it help to go to the /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/base directory and rerun configure/make/make install to see what errors there might have been?

I do not know where or if we retain logs from selfupdate. But you can just try selfupdate again, forcing it to run again:

sudo port -vf selfupdate

> At first I suspected it was from trying to make a macports user, but the user existed for the 2.0 to 2.01 update.

MacPorts will not attempt to create the user or group if they already exist.