questions regarding selfupdate issue

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

I just did an overdue selfupdate, and ran into an issue that obliged me to images_to_archives.tcl step manually. For example:

Processing 132 of 947: gsed-4.2.2_0.darwin_10.x86_64.tbz2
Command failed: /usr/bin/tar -cjf /opt/local/var/macports/software/gsed/gsed-4.2.2_0.darwin_10.x86_64.tbz2 -T /opt/local/var/macports/software/gsed/tarlist > /opt/local/var/macports/software/gsed/error.log 2>&1
Exit code: 1
command execution failed
    while executing
"system "$tarcmd -cjf $newlocation -T ${targetdir}/tarlist > ${targetdir}/error.log 2>&1""
    ("foreach" body line 78)
    invoked from within
"foreach installed $ilist {
    incr counter
    set iname [lindex $installed 0]
    set iversion [lindex $installed 1]
    set irevision [lindex $inst..."
    (file "./src/images_to_archives.tcl" line 38)

I checked a couple of the error logs and tarballs in macports/software, and it seems this was "only" about missing translation files. I know I have at times gone into /opt/local/share/locale and deleted useless locale directories (that really adds up).
I initially tried to unblock the situation by deactivating the offending port (here gsed) and then reactivating it, but apparently the archive tarball had already been recreated because reactivation failed because of those same missing translation files. I certainly did not recreate (all) those tarballs myself after pruning the locale directory ...

In the end I just wrote a script that evoked tcl images_to_archives.tcl as long as it exited with non-zero status, assuming that whatever issue that would lead to would be corrected at the next ugrade of the affected port.

But I've never ran into this before, so what is this apparently new step about?

As a subsidiary question: do I provoke source-only upgrading by adding a configure.optflags option to `port upgrade outdated` or will the option be ignored if a port has binary packages available?

Cheers,
R.