Daily backups of pkgdb failure

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, May 04, 2011 at 01:49:06PM +0200, Hans Ottevanger wrote:
> I upgraded my Soekris 4801 boxes from 8.1 to 8.2-STABLE (r221326) a
> few days ago and now I get the following error in the daily mail:
> 
> Backing up package db directory:
> tar: : Cannot stat: No such file or directory
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
> 
> These messages originate from /etc/periodic/daily/220.backup-pkgdb,
> apparently a recent addition.

CC'ing committer and author.

> The culprit is probably on line 21:
> 
> make -f/usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mk -V PKG_DBDIR
> "/usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mk", line 11: Could not find
> /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.port.mk
> make: fatal errors encountered -- cannot continue
> 
> If there is no /usr/ports present on the system, the script will
> fail. Of course my systems are not unique in this respect: many
> people install pre-built packages instead of building ports
> themselves, especially on minimal hardware configurations.

Agreed.

> Would it be a good idea to check for the presence of /usr/ports (or
> /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.ports.mk) first before calling make, and then try
> $PKG_DBDIR and /var/db/pkg, in that order, if this is not the case?

Again, agreed.  Others may have other recommendations/solutions that are
equally palatable.  Overall, the script needs some more test
conditionals for added ""error"" checking.

I should also take a moment to point out a PR I just created tonight for
RELENG_7, since this periodic script did get backported to that branch.
PR pertains to tar(1) on RELENG_7 complaining about leading slashes on
stderr, while RELENG_8 and newer do not due to differences in each
respective branches' util.c:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=156810

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP 4BD6C0CB |