Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 21:41:36 -0500 (EST) From: Brett Taylor <brett@peloton.runet.edu> To: R Joseph Wright <rjoseph@nwlink.com> Cc: George Cox <gjvc@extremis.demon.co.uk>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What are the differences? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10001272122141.1130-100000@peloton.runet.edu> In-Reply-To: <3890F572.17BF6577@nwlink.com>
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Hi, On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, R Joseph Wright wrote: > Kernel panics may be caused by bad hardware, but most of the error > codes had to do with dependency problems; the ports are suppposed to > handle this, aren't they? Yes and for the majority of people they work fine. I do recall you were having problems w/ the metaports and I never heard (or don't remember reading) whether they were ever resolved. > I still insist that FreeBSD needs a better packaging system for > installing and upgrading with binaries. Insisting is great - helping is better. That said there is a new sysinstall/pkg system in the works. I believe it's supposed to go out the door w/ 4.0, at least that's what sticks in my head. > I have had a lot of problems trying to build metaports for kde and > gnome that are definitely not hardware related. I'd type in "make" in > the gnome metaport, for example, and there would be no response, only > a new command prompt. Did you have a previous work directory there (this is my guess for what the problem was - your description of the symptom sounds exactly like what you would get if this was true)? If you had a work directory and if there is a .build_done cookie in it then it won't build because it thinks the software has already been built. Make clean is your friend here. For a metaport, make distclean may be even better. > This was using a freshly updated ports tree. Also, you can't update > software with the ports, you can only install a new program, and it > won't uninstall the old one for you. This is *my* experience with the > ports, if it works for you, wonderful. There are times you don't want to install the old one (tk and friends were/are one of these). There are certainly times you do however. Knowing what to do and when to do it is tricky. Example - say you upgrade xv and with it comes a new version of jpeg. Should the packaging system then dump the old jpeg and screw up any other programs that also depend on the old jpeg libs or install all new packages for everything else (say gimp, Window Maker etc)? I'd much rather have manual control and KNOW what's going to be changed and how it affects the other software on my machine than hope the packaging software does the right thing or find that it tried to upgrade 20 different things because one library changed for the one thing I tried to upgrade. I've heard complaints about this same problem from users of RPMs and Debian's pkg utility. Brett ***************************************************** Dr. Brett Taylor brett@peloton.runet.edu * Dept of Chem and Physics * Curie 39A (540) 831-6147 * Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics * Walker 234 (540) 831-5410 * ***************************************************** To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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