Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2010 02:19:50 +0100 From: RW <rwmaillists@googlemail.com> To: ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: portmanager endlessly looping in x11 Message-ID: <20100909021950.5fa00357@gumby.homeunix.com> In-Reply-To: <4C88030C.1030505@telenix.org> References: <4C75C308.5060506@telenix.org> <4C75F8F9.3060704@DataIX.net> <4C88030C.1030505@telenix.org>
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On Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:41:32 -0400 Chuck Robey <chuckr@telenix.org> wrote: > I'm making no mistake tho, moved from > portmanager to portmaster) which doesn't seem to have this uneveness, > so while it takes a whole lot longer to work than portmanager (it > uses slow but sure shell utils for it's databases) I don't know why people think portmanager is fast. It may be written in C, but in most upgrades it builds *many* more ports than portmaster or portupgrade would do. The point of a portmanager is to upgrade correctly with as little human intervention as is possible; and it sacrifices a lot of cpu cycles to that end. > it really does a far more reliable job of things. Something it does, sometimes it doesn't. portmanager will handle a lot upgrades correctly even when instructions in UPDATING that are required for portmaster are ignored. With portupgrade I've had a few problems where the UPDATING entry was made after I updated the ports. These have been much more serious than harmless looping. > One really big irritation was > how portmanager would rebuild something completely successfully 3 > times, but since it would fail its dependency scans, it never would > recognize that any of those looping apps had been rebuilt. Very > puzzling, until I realized about the dependency problems. I didn't follow what you were were saying, but portmanager has at least two features that can lead to looping. One is that it can rebuild ports when it detects a dynamic change in port dependencies. The other is when it tries to resolve conflicts by package deletion and iterative rebuilding. There are probably more. AFAIK it shouldn't actually loop endlessly because of its "three-strikes database". In my experience portmanager goes through good and bad patches as the installed ports change and their dependencies evolve. Even when it's not completing successfully by it's own criteria, it usually does the job without leaving any real problems of its own making.
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