My FreeBSD box must be sick today. For some reasons, when I ran the portsnap command (i.e., portsnap fetch update), it removed the entire port directory (i.e., rm /usr/ports -Rf). Therefore, I decided to build the entire port tree:

sudo su
cd /var/db/portsnap
rm -Rf *
portsnap fetch extract

I decided to run portmaster to update my system, I got the following error:

===>>> The devel/automake110 port has been deleted: No longer required by any port
===>>> Aborting update
Terminated

Well, the problem looks pretty simple. FreeBSD found an out-dated package installed in my system, and it could not find any corresponding port (Already deleted in the repository), that’s why it stops there and doesn’t know what to do next.

To solve this problem, the solution is very simple:

First, let’s see what version of automake we have in our system:

pkg_info | grep auto

which return:

autoconf-2.62       Automatically configure source code on many Un*x platforms
autoconf-2.68       Automatically configure source code on many Un*x platforms
autoconf-wrapper-20101119 Wrapper script for GNU autoconf
automake-1.10.1     GNU Standards-compliant Makefile generator (1.10)
automake-1.11.1     GNU Standards-compliant Makefile generator (1.11)
automake-wrapper-20101119 Wrapper script for GNU automake

Apparently, the older version of autoconf and automake cause the issues. Why not remove them?

sudo pkg_delete autoconf-2.62 automake-1.10.1

I re-ran the portmaster to update the system. Everything worked fine again!

–Derrick