Rebuilding broken ports over...and over...and over

[Craig Treleaven]

At 1:37 PM -0400 6/15/12, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
>  > I then cleaned perl5.12 and tried "sudo port install perl5.12 
>+universal".  It trundled away installing several universal versions 
>of dependencies but while 'finishing' it found 4 broken ports and 
>reinstalled them.  Then it found 2 broken ports (different this 
>time) and reinstalled them.  After that it found 4 broken ports--the 
>same it found the first time and reinstalled them.  Next it found 7 
>broken ports, including some repeats and some new, and ... 
>Eventually I hit Control-C.
>>
>>  Rather than mess around more, what is the best way to start 
>>fresh--short of wiping the disk and reinstalling OS X, XCode, etc?
>
>So the rebuild issue is that likely, there are dependencies being 
>had that aren't actually recorded. So when you build package X with 
>universal it may not go back in and rebuild Y universal as well.
>
>You could dump out the ports you actually want (port echo requested) 
>and save them somewhere, deactivate everything you have installed, 
>then feed your list of requested ports in as your install command.
>
>Be sure to add +universal if you still want it.

Um, I thought I'd done that (and more) when I did "sudo port 
uninstall installed".

Some time ago, I followed the migration instructions on another 
machine and did "sudo port clean all".  Is that a good option?  I 
remember being surprised at how long it took.  I think it would be 
faster to delete the whole /opt/... hierarchy and reinstall MacPorts?

And, no, I didn't really want universal.  I thought the lack of it 
was causing the hiccup.

Craig