Here's what happens: catalina-vm% cmp -lb portlist.tcl /opt/local/libexec/macports/lib/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl cmp: /opt/local/libexec/macports/lib/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl: Illegal byte sequence
It looks like the file on my system is hosed to the point where it's not even recognized as a text file anymore. I can't read the file using vi either, vi shows an empty buffer with the message: "portlist.tcl" [readonly][READ ERRORS] 0L, 0B Interestingly, both the file downloaded from GitHub and the corrupted one on my system are both exactly 10,041 bytes in size. There's no way to checksum the files though, since my corrupted file can't be read by anything, it seems: catalina-vm% openssl dgst -sha256 /opt/local/libexec/macports/lib/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl Read error in /opt/local/libexec/macports/lib/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl C09D841001000000:error:8000005C:system library:file_read:Illegal byte sequence:crypto/bio/bss_file.c:148:calling fread() C09D841001000000:error:10080002:BIO routines:file_read:system lib:crypto/bio/bss_file.c:150: -- Jason Liu On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 3:34 PM Joshua Root <[email protected]> wrote: > Diffing your portlist.tcl with a fresh copy downloaded from > < > https://github.com/macports/macports-base/blob/v2.11.6/src/portlist1.0/portlist.tcl> > > will show you exactly what has changed at least, which may give some > further clue. > > - Josh > > On 26/12/2025 03:22, Jason Liu wrote: > > That's a good point. In fact, the modification timestamp on portlist.tcl > > is 2025-10-29 05:01, which would seem to indicate that the file hasn't > > been touched for the past couple of months. > > > > The "illegal byte sequence" error does point to file corruption, but the > > mystery is how that might have occurred. I did also check the ZFS volume > > where the virtual disk for my MacPorts development VM is stored, and > > none of the the weekly scrubs have repaired any bits, nor has any > > resilvering been performed, which are typically early indicators that a > > drive might be failing. > > > > -- > > Jason Liu > > > > > > On Wed, Dec 24, 2025 at 9:06 PM Ryan Carsten Schmidt > > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > > > On Dec 24, 2025, at 18:49, Jason Liu wrote: > >> > >> > >> > >> portlist.tcl is a text file, not created by clang, and Jason > >> didn't mention running selfupdate so there's no reason why > >> that file should have been changed. > >> > >> > >> Sorry, I forgot to mention that. This did, in fact, occur after a > >> selfupdate. I have my MacPorts development VMs run a selfupdate > >> every night around 5:00am-ish. > > > > Ok but unless that selfupdate resulted in MacPorts base being > > updated, that file wouldn't have been touched. > > > > And if you run selfupdate daily then you'd have updated to the > > latest version 2.11.6 weeks ago when it was released. > > > >
