First of all I have to say that “tinderbox” ( http://tinderbox.marcuscom.com ) is a great tool. It’s probably the most important tool to verify new ports and/or patches on different FreeBSD versions (and with a little trick even on different architectures). And it is also a nice tool to find missing entries in pkg-plist.

That said I have to add that it can be an pain in the ass. I’m currently working on an upgrade of devel/boost-* ports to version 1.43 – right now I’m in the phase where I test other programs with the newer library – of course with tinderbox. However – I added a port to the queue for alls systems / architectures I have in my tb – and realized to late, that it would need to build about another 200 ports dependencies (per instance) – so I looked at the command list to find something to stop the whole lunacy (I should add that I use the patch which enables me to use several tinderd instances) – I tried “resetBuild” but that didn’t really work out – after that I used tbkill.

Well as it seems I also tried to restart my tinderd processes – which was a mistake because it left me a tinderlock directory and a tinderd.xxxx file in my /tmp directory. Those 2 then caused me the problem that tinderd would not accept anything in the queue – but building something with ./tc … directly worked fine.

The whole point of me writing this, is that if you encounter the problem that tinderd just won’t do anything – check your /tmp directory for leftovers – it might help…

PS.: I’m well aware that the problem was caused by me playing around – but show me someone who does not “play” a little bit with “toys” like tinderbox…