John Dalbec wrote: > On Aug 21, 2007, at 1:30 AM, Martin Costabel wrote: [] > Another thing I tried in order to get "fink selfupdate" to delete /sw/ > fink.old before trying to move /sw/fink out of the way was to "mv /sw/ > fink/dists /sw/finkdists" and rerun selfupdate twice. That didn't > help and the selfupdate seemed to reconstruct /sw/fink/dists so I > deleted /sw/finkdists. Is there information about installed packages > in /sw/fink/dists?
The only problem with repeated selfupdates - or rather repeated switches between selfupdate-rsync and selfupdate-svn - is that fink is renaming the previous /sw/fink to /sw/fink.old, and when there is already an existing /sw/fink.old it doesn't know what to do and crashes. Therefore you need to move /sw/fink.old out of the way manually or delete it. Anything else should be left to fink selfupdate. In particular, the symbolic link /sw/fink/dists should be left in place. It points to the current distribution, 10.4 in your case, if I remember corrrectly. Inside /sw/fink/10.4 there are all the package descriptions that fink needs for installing packages. It does not contain any information, however, on the installed packages. This information is contained in several subdirectories of /sw/var, in particular in /sw/var/lib/dpkg/, and it is recreated by commands like "fink scanpackages" and "fink index". But these commands are also run automatically at the end of fink selfupdate, so there should not be any need to run them manually in your situation. The only other thing that you are losing by removing /sw/fink.old are your *.deb packages that you built yourself by "installing from source". They live in directories like /sw/fink/10.4/unstable/main/binary-darwin-powerpc/, and they have symbolic links pointing to them in /sw/fink/debs/. This makes a difference when you reinstall a package that you had installed previously and removed in the meantime. Normally such a package would be reinstalled very quickly from the *.deb file. Now it will have to be rebuilt from source or re-downloaded from the bindist server. To repeat: Nothing inside /sw/fink/ contains any information about what packages are installed on your system. It contains all the information about which packages are available for installation from source, but none about what is already installed. -- Martin ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Fink-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-users
