Snappy the Clam

I've been running FreeBSD on a laptop at work. Couple days ago I installed cadaver out of ports, and in the process it upgraded expat. X promptly stopped working. So I ran

portupgrade -rf textproc/expat2

and it compiled away for a full day.

Then X worked, but the UI widgets had no text. None. Menus. Toolbars. Window decks. Anywhere. Whee. Apparently gtk had failed to upgrade due to a lack of the XML::Parser module. So I installed that and figured I better upgrade gtk20, so I'm running

portupgrade -rf x11-toolkits/gtk20

And it's still compiling now. I like FreeBSD a lot, but man, I've been compiling for about 3 days now (nights off.)

Cool. Now libxslt is failing on the version of libxml that's installed. I realize I've probably done something entirely clueless here, but linux is looking better and better here to me. It at least occasionally lets me use the machine.

UPDATE: From the FreeBSD GNOME Project: GNOME 2.6 Upgrading FAQ

One last update: Ran the script yesterday am. It had me fix a few anamolies in the pkg database and then told me that it was about to rebuild all Gnome apps and dependencies, and that if I'd been "planning a long day trip, it might be a good day to take it." Yipes. I started the script at 10. When I left the office at 6, it was still compiling Mozilla.

OK, really the last: I came in this am and it worked, is done, and X has text. Yay.