MacPorts 2.6.2 broke during upgrades

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Ryan,


On 2019-10-23 04:19:30 +0200 Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> 
wrote:

>> I cannot even list outdated packages, look:
> 
>> $ sudo port list outdated
>> sudo: Can't mkdir /var/db/sudo/multix: File exists
> 
> This is certainly odd. It sounds like it is trying to create the 
> directory 
> /var/db/sudo/multix but a file or directory of that name already 
> exists. You 
> might try deleting the file or directory /var/db/sudo/multix (or at 
> least 
> temporarily renaming it to something else) and see if that helps 
> anything.
> 
> A similar problem was reported on reddit some years ago. In that 
> instance, 
> the problem appears to have been a bad hard drive. You might check 
> your disk 
> with Disk Utility and use some other method of verifying the drive's 
> SMART 
> status, and make sure you have current backups just in case.


The hard disk is new, I changed it, it is only a few month old SSD.

After a few days, I retried and it worked. A reboot apparenlty did 
wonders. I think there are sometimes issues with putting the Mac to 
sleep that confuse the filesystem, I expreienced sometimes that files 
are not found when they do exist.

> I also want to point out that there is no need to use sudo when 
> performing 
> read-only operations like listing ports, and also that "list 
> outdated" is 
> probably not the command you want to run; the command you probably 
> want is 
> "outdated". See https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#portlist.

Yes, port outdated is better. I just issued the command because it was 
an easy way to reproduce the issue.

Riccardo