freebsd stable - Mar 2008 - portupgrade, recommended by 7 release notes, breaks perl

Seems portupgrade can easily break the perl install.

How? Well there are various modules which can be updated
but are also part of the base perl and are hence required.

A good example of this is ExtUtils::MakeMaker. If you
uninstall any version of this port your done for, as
trying to build it requires ExtUtils::Command which in
turn requires ExtUtils::MakeMaker which was just deleted.

This circular dependency would not be an issue if the
uninstall somehow knew that the files where required
by perl, and hence didn't break the base port ( perl )
by removing them.

I found this by following the 7.0-RELEASE upgrade
guide which recommends: portupgrade -faP

This ended up with a totally broken install which
took quite some time to fix so I thought it best to
highlight the issue so it can be addressed.

I'm not 100% sure but I think I also spotted portupgrade
reinstalling the same port over and over during this
process. Could this be the case and if so is there
an option to prevent it?

    Regards
    Steve

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Steven Hartland wrote:
> Seems portupgrade can easily break the perl install.
> 
> How? Well there are various modules which can be updated
> but are also part of the base perl and are hence required.
> 
> A good example of this is ExtUtils::MakeMaker. If you
> uninstall any version of this port your done for, as
> trying to build it requires ExtUtils::Command which in
> turn requires ExtUtils::MakeMaker which was just deleted.
> 
> This circular dependency would not be an issue if the
> uninstall somehow knew that the files where required
> by perl, and hence didn't break the base port ( perl )
> by removing them.
I think something is not quite right in your analysis, because perl does 
not depend on any external perl modules (it cannot, by definition).

Kris