CVSUP, ports tree and an inescapable sinking feeling.

[James]

Sometime in January I was going through my normal housekeeping routines, and
this included checking my port versions against a CVsup'ped ports tree.

This is pretty much what I saw;

ImageMagick-5.5.1.4                 ?   orphaned: graphics/ImageMagick
Maaate-0.3.0                        ?   orphaned: audio/Maaate
ORBit-0.5.15_1                      ?   orphaned: devel/ORBit
Sablot-0.96_2                       ?   orphaned: textproc/sablotron

...etc...

On checking the ports tree, it had become;

/usr/ports

total 6590
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel  6611968 Dec 31 21:32 INDEX.db
drwxr-xr-x   7 root  wheel     6144 Jan 14 03:57 audio
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel     4096 Jan 14 04:04 databases
drwxr-xr-x   7 root  wheel    18432 Jan 14 04:15 devel
drwxr-xr-x  12 2074  wheel     5120 Jan  6 19:55 distfiles
drwxr-xr-x   4 root  wheel     8704 Jan 14 04:26 games
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel     8704 Jan 14 04:32 graphics
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel     4608 Jan 14 04:41 lang
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  wheel     6144 Jan 14 04:45 mail
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel     7680 Jan 14 04:51 misc
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel    12288 Jan 14 04:57 net
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel     4096 Jan 14 05:05 print
drwxr-xr-x   4 root  wheel     9216 Jan 14 05:12 textproc
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  wheel     9728 Jan 14 05:16 www

My supfile _was_ operating quite happily for a while as;

*default tag=RELENG_4
*default host=cvsup5.uk.freebsd.org
*default prefix=/usr
*default base=/usr/local/etc/cvsup
*default release=cvs delete use-rel-suffix compress

# Source
src-all
ports-all
# The documentation
doc-all

After feverishly running CVSUP a couple of times with the verbosity turned
up, I couldn't see anything that would tell me what had happened to the
ports tree, or why it was refusing to rebuild.  I've resigned myself to
downloading and recreating the ports tree by hand, but any clues as to how
and why this happened would be gratefully received.  I certainly _don't_
trust that my sources are correct, either.  I've gone through the checkout
files, but I can't find anything approaching documentation for them.

Parsing supfile "/etc/cvsupfile"
Connecting to cvsup5.uk.freebsd.org
Connected to cvsup5.uk.freebsd.org
Server software version: SNAP_16_1e
Negotiating file attribute support
Exchanging collection information
Establishing multiplexed-mode data connection
Running
Updating collection src-all/cvs
 Edit src/sys/sys/event.h
  Add delta 1.5.2.6 2003.02.09.15.28.13 nectar
Updating collection ports-all/cvs
Updating collection doc-all/cvs
Shutting down connection to server
Finished successfully