Wednesday, 20 June 2012

FreeBSD PCRE hell

Yesterday I need to build nmap out of the ports tree to test for open ports on a host. When I started the make install it told me that it need a later version of the pcre port and that I should deinstall/reinstall pcre which I proceeded to do.

This was a bad mistake. PCRE seems to be linked to almost "all" other ports and just upgrading pcre and its libraries breaks quite a lot of things. Even simple things like vim stopped working.

The easiest way to recover was to do the following:

1) read /usr/ports/UPDATING (note its not /usr/sys/UPDATING which is the only file I knew off)
2) cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portmaster ; make install

3) portmaster -w devel/pcre (to correctly upgrade PCRE - information from UPDATING file in step 1)
4) portmaster -R pcre (update / rebuild all ports that rely on pcre)




After a few hours, everything completed with no issues.


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