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Old 24th May 2011
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IdOp IdOp is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: twisting on the daemon's fork(2)
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Thanks to everyone for the further helpful comments, they're much appreciated, and the thread linked by jggimi looks very relevant, I'll go through it soon.

I should clarify a bit the sequence of events because something I wrote above was confused (sorry about that). My statement that I downloaded the packages after the system snapshot is incorrect, and doesn't fully fit with the observed problem. I must have had in mind installing the packages after the snapshot (as must be) but that is of course irrelevant, what matters is when the packages were compiled relative to the snapshot. So here is what happened.

1) I downloaded the packages from a mirror (mirror.ece.vt.edu) to a shell account, bundled them up and put them on a website.

2) Within 24 hours of 1) I went to download that bundle and decided to get a new system snapshot. Here, I checked ftp.openbsd.org to see what the latest snapshot was. I was going to download it from mirror.ece.vt.edu, but the one there was still older, so I got the latest from the Chicago mirror.

So you can see that due to the order of events, mirror lag, and the very questionable decision to do #2, it ended up with the packages being older than the snapshot, and by bad luck the library bump must have occurred in that gap. The rest is history.

My takeaway from this is that, to minimize the chances of lack of sync, one should download the packages and snapshot from the same site at the "same time". If I want the latest, find a mirror that has the latest snapshot and use its packages too. Hope that is about right.
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