gnome_upgrade212.sh upgrades EVERYTHING

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 23:18:14 +0000
> From: Thomas Quinot <thomas at FreeBSD.org>
> Sender: owner-freebsd-gnome at freebsd.org
> 
> Basically that script does a portupgrade -a.
> 
> That seems unwarranted, unnecesary and extremely dangerous, especially
> since there is absolutely zero indication anywhere that the script is
> going to upgrade stuff that has absolutely NOTHING to do with gnome.
> 
> The author of the script has all rights to think that:
> 
> # Everyone should run a portupgrade -a on their
> # system from time to time anyway.
> 
> but it really seems more than questionable to actually enforce that
> without prominent prior notice. Had I known that such sensitive packages
> Procmail, Apache and MySQL (and 90 other packages with absolutely no
> relationship to GNOME) would be upgraded by the script, I certainly
> would NOT have started the process.
> 
> This is now likely to cause me hours of work to fix up the mess such
> a sweeping upgrade is bound to cause.

Unfortunately, the gnome upgrade results in a new version of glib20
which has an ABI/API that is incompatible with the old version. It is
truly impressive how many ports depend on glib20 when gnome has been
installed on a system. 

The only reliable way to deal with this is to re-build all apps that are
dependent on glib20. At least on my systems this has been a LOT less
than a "portupgrade -af", but it does hit a most everything that has a
GUI on the system.

What I did (and this was NOT recommended by anyone) was to start the
script and build the list of ports to be upgraded. I then killed it and
edited the list to remove a number of application packages (like
OpenOffice.org) that were very time consuming to rebuild. Then I re-ran
the script with -restart.

Unfortunately, that was not good enough. After one system successfully
completed the upgrade I found that at least two applications of come
significance would not run even though they had been re-built. (gkrellm
and fam.) Both went into instant loops and had to be killed. I
eventually DID do a 'portupgrade -af' which ran for 6 days (over 710
ports re-installed) and, when it was finished, everything ran.  

Yes, I did try 'portupgrade -Rf gkrellm', but that didn't help. Even
truss was no help as gkrellm started looping before making any system
calls for truss to report.

I guess the only real answer is to skip gnome-upgrade and just
'portupgrade -af' with a few carefully selected -x exceptions. OF
course, you need to do this when you won't be using the system display
for a while.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634