freebsd stable - Jul 2009 - Weird portmaster behaviour -- everything fails to install

Hi all,

I've spent the weekend doing a ports catch-up: there seems to
have been a lot of activity recently!  It's taking a long time
at least partly because portmaster doesn't seem to be "doing the
right thing" all of a sudden: it will happily trace the
dependencies and build the first superceded port, but fails to
re-install it.   On every occsaion this weekend, it gets to
===> Installing for foo-0.123_2
===> Generating temporary packing list
===> Checking if graphics/foo already installed
===>  foo-0.123_2 is already installed
     You may wish to "make deinstall" and blah, blah, blah...

Of course it's installed, that's why I'm running portmaster!

So I go into the directory, run make deinstall reinstall clean,
and that goes without a hitch.  Restart portmaster -uBd -a and
half an hour later it will fail in the same way, and I'll have
to do the same dance.

It's most likely something dumb that I've got misconfigured: can
anyone suggest to me where I should look?

(I don't normally run with the -B switch.  I put that in
recently to stop it from trying to build backup packages,
because it had previously been failing dismally at that stage,
because most of the installed files didn't match their md5
hashes for some reason.  I'm not too concerned with that:
packing lists often get mixed up, in my experience.)

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew

Problem solved!

In case anyone is interested, or has encountered a similar
problem, I believe that my problem was that somehow my
/var/db/pkg directory had a whole pile of near-duplicate entries
corresponding to port revisions.  Portmaster was checking the
installed version against the MD5 hashes in the "old" version
+CONTENTS file, and they weren't matching.  I assume that I
acquired all of these out-of-date pkg entries through a backup
restore mishap: I've been having gmirror issues lately (not
gmirror's fault, I think -- just a series of dodgy hard drives.)

All is good again.  No duplicate db/pkg entries at last, and
portmaster runs to completion as intended.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 08:24:03AM +1000, Andrew Reilly
wrote:
> I've spent the weekend doing a ports catch-up: there seems to
> have been a lot of activity recently!  It's taking a long time
> at least partly because portmaster doesn't seem to be "doing the
> right thing" all of a sudden: it will happily trace the
> dependencies and build the first superceded port, but fails to
> re-install it.   On every occsaion this weekend, it gets to
> ===> Installing for foo-0.123_2
> ===> Generating temporary packing list
> ===> Checking if graphics/foo already installed
> ===>  foo-0.123_2 is already installed
>      You may wish to "make deinstall" and blah, blah, blah...
> 
> Of course it's installed, that's why I'm running portmaster!
> 
> So I go into the directory, run make deinstall reinstall clean,
> and that goes without a hitch.  Restart portmaster -uBd -a and
> half an hour later it will fail in the same way, and I'll have
> to do the same dance.
> 
> It's most likely something dumb that I've got misconfigured: can
> anyone suggest to me where I should look?