On Oct 24, 2007, at 03:12, Anders F Björklund wrote:
Jyrki Wahlstedt wrote:
For some reason yesterday, as I was doing 'port selfupdate; port outdated' that is quite routine for me, I ended up with error message saying something like: port installed failed, list element ended with } instead of space (the exact wording escapes me at the moment). However, the result is that I am informed I have no ports installed! Probably I have to install all ports again from scratch, which takes time that could be used more productively and is a RPITA?! How could this kind of situation be avoided or if disaster hits, how could the ports be restored? The problem is to find all packages that are installed and active, and to find the configuration (i.e. variants) used to build them. I'd hope a new selfupdate could solve the problem, but I am not optimistic.
It's possible it is "just" your port index that is broken (if you are using SVN this happens all the time), so try rebuilding this first by running `portindex` in your dports directory. If you are using rsync, PortIndex should be updated too - so then it's something else.
Remember we had that situation where trying to install gcc43 would install a corrupted port receipt which would completely bork all your ports. Maybe something like that happened again? http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/changeset/29009 What was the last port you updated? If you don't remember, maybe you can find out by looking at the last modification date in the port receipts.