Very Computer

Hi,

When I started playing around with FreeBSD (releases 4.3 and 4.4),
ports worked like a dream.  cd to the directory, make install and
everything always went smoothly.  Even huge apps like KDE and Gnome.

Since I started using 4.5, I get nothing but checksum errors when
installing ALMOST ANY PORT larger than x11/wrapper.  A couple of the
more recent failed installs have been www/mozilla and x11-wm/wmaker.

I've tried doing:

make fetch
make makesum
make install

but it seems that the checksum errors may be occuring in files other
than
the ones obtained by "make fetch".  My questions are (1) is there any
easy fix for this behavior that I've missed? (2) is this occuring
because of updated ports or the updated FreeBSD release? (3) how does
everyone else typically deal with this problem?

I install packages when I can, but would really like to know why I
can't get ports to work anymore.  I don't have a ton of experience
with FreeBSD, so forgive me if I'm forgetting something obvious.  I've
searched Usenet for answers and finally decided to post.  I'll be
happy to provide more info if needed :)

Thanks in advance,
Matt

Quote:> When I started playing around with FreeBSD (releases 4.3 and 4.4),
> ports worked like a dream.  cd to the directory, make install and
> everything always went smoothly.  Even huge apps like KDE and Gnome.

> Since I started using 4.5, I get nothing but checksum errors when
> installing ALMOST ANY PORT larger than x11/wrapper.  A couple of the
> more recent failed installs have been www/mozilla and x11-wm/wmaker.

I'd suggest updating via cvsup to the latest ports collection. See
http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/cvsup.html how to do this (in case you are not
familiar with cvsup).

The install the ports/sysutils/portupgrade port (it contains nice and very fast
tools for the ports collection).

See the portsupgrade(1) man page for details and pointers other tools
documentation (for example pkgdb -F will fix your database of installed ports &
packages).

If a port complains about corrupt distfiles, the might have been fetched only
partly (depending on your configuration), and the checksums of those corrupt
files is - of course - wrong.

So, have a look into a port's 'distinfo' file to see, which archives are
required by a port. Then you can locate the files in /usr/ports/distfiles and
check the md5 sum manually (using md5 filename), or just delete and refetch
them.

Simon

Thanks, Simon.  I'll check that out.

Matt

By updating my ports tree (using CVSup), I was able to get rid of most
of the checksum errors.  For Mozilla, I started getting an "Unexpected
EOF block" error (or something to that effect).  For whatever reason,
my /usr/ports/distfiles directory contained a bogus file.  After
manually re-downloading the file, I was able to get everything to
work.  The same thing also happened with a couple other applications.
I'd suggest to anyone experiencing these problems when installing
ports:

* Update the ports tree
* Make sure the files in /usr/ports/distfiles are legit
* When you try to rebuild the port, run 'make clean; make makesum;
make install'

Thanks again for the tips, Simon.

Matt