[Fink-users] Re: selfupdate, update-allfail to pick up new packages on a /sw copy

[David M. W. <dmwood@Mines.EDU>]

Thanks to those who posted, esp. Jeff Speir and Ij Palmer!

Recap: Naive copy onto DVD using Finder messed up /sw tree.
Lesson: Use tar only, never the Finder, to produce copies of a /sw 
tree.  Make sure (although I could see no such flags for tar)
that symlinks get copied as symlinks, not resolved into the files or 
directories they point to.

Sure enough, many symlinks had been followed (i.e., files or 
directories were copied
in place of a symlink) in the Finder copy, messing up the tree.

I ended up fixing things by:

1. rsync -a -v --force -e ssh me@tuber:/sw/ /sw/

to sync the local, problematic copy with the known-good original (on 
tuber).  [The option -n
does a dry run, good for the faint-of-heart.]

2.  I did some rm -rf  on files rsync flagged as differing from the 
known-good source.  A typical
complaint might be:

delete_file: rmdir(include/libpng) : Directory not empty
rsync: symlink "include/libpng" -> "libpng12": File exists

3. I used fink purge on packages which had produced the directory trees 
which had been flagged
in 2 (luckily, the pkg files were already present).

4. I used fink (or Fink Commander) to re-install from .pkg files the 
problematic packages.

All is now well.  Thanks again, everybody.

David M. Wood, Dept. of Physics, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 
80401
Phone: (303) 273-3853; Fax: (303) 273-3919
http://www.mines.edu/Academic/physics/people/pages/wood.html