I've been working on a complete build of those FreeBSD ports that I use for over 5 weeks. I can't say I haven't
made progress, but it was very slow, and all of this should have happened without any
problems. Still, it was a little surprising when I read today:
install -o root -g wheel -m 444 /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/feh/work/feh-2.9.2/AUTHORS /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/feh/work/feh-2.9.2/ChangeLog /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/feh/work/feh-2.9.2/README /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/feh/work/feh-2.9.2/TODO /usr/local/share/doc/feh
===> Compressing manual pages for feh-2.9.2_1
===> Registering installation for feh-2.9.2_1
124.86 real 73.52 user 24.97 sys
I'm done! What do I do now? Start again, of course, this time with pkgng. But not today. First there was some
wound-licking to do. Yesterday's build of gsl wasn't the only one to die trying to run makeinfo—this time it was zsh—so I went to see what was going on. Surprise,
surprise! My environment variables again, helped by incompatibilities in texinfo. I
have two versions of makeinfo installed, one from the base system, the other (newer,
but released under the dreaded GPL version
3 , which, we're told, is far too dangerous to include in the FreeBSD source tree) from
the ports. For this sort of reason I have /usr/local/bin before /usr/bin in
my PATH environment variable. But it's not right for building ports; there you
specify the new version of texinfo by adding this line to the port Makefile:
After that, nip2 failed with
more sinister messages:
cc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/graphviz -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/local/include/gio-unix-2.0/ -I/usr/local/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/local/include/cairo -I/usr/local/include/pixman-1 -I/usr/local/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 -I/usr/local/include/libxml2 -I/usr/local/include/GraphicsMagick -I/usr/local/include/orc-0.4 -D_THREAD_SAFE -I/usr/local/include/OpenEXR -I/usr/local/include/pango-1.0 -pthread -I/usr/local/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/local/include/freetype2 -I/usr/local/include/libpng15 -I/usr/local/include -DG_DISABLE_CAST_CHECKS -O2 -pipe -fno-strict-aliasing -MT nip2-graphwindow.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/nip2-graphwindow.Tpo -c -o nip2-graphwindow.o `test -f 'graphwindow.c' || echo './'`graphwindow.c
graphwindow.c: In function 'graphwindow_build_graph':
graphwindow.c:263: error: too few arguments to function 'agread'
gmake[3]: *** [nip2-graphwindow.o] Error 1
That was another case for pkg_add -r, not without a certain amount of complaining
that suggests that the packages aren't that up to date after all:
=== root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/2) /home/Sysconfig/scripts 13 -> pkg_add -r nip2 Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-9-stable/Latest/nip2.tbz... Done.
pkg_add: warning: package 'nip2-7.26.3_1' requires 'gsfonts-8.11_5', but 'gsfonts-8.11_6' is installed
pkg_add: warning: package 'nip2-7.26.3_1' requires 'png-1.5.14', but 'png-1.5.15' is installed
pkg_add: warning: package 'nip2-7.26.3_1' requires 'jasper-1.900.1_10', but 'jasper-1.900.1_12' is installed
pkg_add: warning: package 'nip2-7.26.3_1' requires 'pkgconf-0.9.1_2', but 'pkgconf-0.9.2_1' is installed
pkg_add: warning: package 'nip2-7.26.3_1' requires 'ghostscript9-9.06_1', but 'ghostscript9-9.06_2' is installed
pkg_add: warning: package 'nip2-7.26.3_1' requires 'libxml2-2.8.0_1', but 'libxml2-2.8.0_2' is installed
pkg_add: warning: package 'nip2-7.26.3_1' requires 'shared-mime-info-1.0_2', but 'shared-mime-info-1.1' is installed
And in the process I found that my root file system (which includes /usr) was too
small, giving rise to amusing error messages like:
=== root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/Sysconfig/scripts 80 -> pkg_add -r nip2 Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-9-stable/Latest/nip2.tbz...pkg_add: find_play_pen: can't find enough temporary space to extract the files, please set your
PKG_TMPDIR environment variable to a location with at least 0 bytes
free
It seems that 20 GB is really the minimum practical file system size for a combined root
and /usr file system, and I only had 10.
But that was all. Now I have an almost up to date system. Started building the latest
kernel, and moved on to other things.
It's the middle of the month again, time to take photos of the garden.. The garden didn't do
well this summer, and looking back, it's clear there were not one, but two reasons: not only
was it hot and dry, but my irrigation made things worse. Some time back I decided to
replace sprinklers with drippers, but despite following the instructions and calculations,
it's (now) clear that there wasn't nearly enough water. The roses stopped flowering
altogether, and only now, when it's moister but much colder, did some start to flower again:
Peter Jeremy tells me that he also has Narcissus flowering at the moment.
The petunias haven't done well either—I wonder if it's at least partially because some of
them are three years old. Next year I should buy fresh plants. But we still have half a
flower hanging on:
The Hebes have also suffered a lot,
despite above-average attention to water, but they haven't died. Strangely, the Hebes I
planted last August, and
which I never got round to irrigating, are quite happy and already flowering:
17 May doesn't sound like a very important day, but for me it marks three changes in my
life. From today's calendar entry:
May 17 Greg starts working at Karstadt, 1976
May 17 Greg starts working at Tandem, 1982
May 17 Greg last flew in an aeroplane, 2006
Those three anniversaries roughly sum up my working life. Yes, I started earlier, and
finished a little later, but Karstadt and
Tandem were my main employers,
between them accounting for about half my working life. All the funnier that in Germany,
where people always start a new job at the beginning of the month, I should have
started two consecutive jobs on 17 May.
This ports build has seriously held up other work I've had waiting. Today started on the
backlog: merging changes in head back into the stable branch. In the Good
Old Days with CVS, it was all manual,
but now we're using subversion,
and there's a merge command. Spent some time learning how to use that.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. I try to leave the pages here for two days;
you'll find them all in the archive, so if I fall
behind a day or two, you may find more here. Note that I often update a diary entry a
day or two after I write it.
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