From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jan 27 22: 5: 3 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from smtp.nwlink.com (smtp.nwlink.com [209.20.130.57]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 39C5014C16 for ; Thu, 27 Jan 2000 22:04:55 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from rjoseph@nwlink.com) Received: from nwlink.com (ip235.r8.d.bel.nwlink.com [207.202.173.235]) by smtp.nwlink.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA21534 for ; Thu, 27 Jan 2000 22:04:50 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <38913091.F815223D@nwlink.com> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2000 22:00:49 -0800 From: R Joseph Wright X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 3.4-STABLE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What are the differences? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Brett Taylor wrote: > > 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 never did get the metaport to work. First, I need to sort out the various culprits at work: there's the hardware issue of my cpu overheating during some of the builds. Step #1 is to get it to cool correctly. Then I can work on what is causing the error codes. > > > 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'd love to help but first I should probably learn to write a "hello world" program :-) > > 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. I should have documented it better but I'm quite sure I did a make clean. > > 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. > Good point. BTW, it's nice to feel a bit of familiarity among other users out there 8) R Joseph Wright *I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues --Duke Ellington* To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message