Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 17:48:43 -0400 From: Robert Huff <roberthuff@rcn.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Recovering loss of /var/db/pkg ? Message-ID: <18909.7099.473247.432680@jerusalem.litteratus.org> In-Reply-To: <44iqlf2bc1.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> References: <20090408142932.695c07ce@summersault.com> <44iqlf2bc1.fsf@be-well.ilk.org>
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Lowell Gilbert writes: > > /var/db/pkg is long gone and there is no backup. It was not copied to > > new a machine. > > > > Is there is any hope of being able to use the ports or packages > > system in a meangingful way again? > > You can do a forced reinstall of all your ports, and you'll end > up with a repopulated ports database. It will take a lot of > clock time, but not much human time. Assuming everything goes cleanly. > It's not necessarily easy to figure out what all of the ports > were, but there are a number of choices. It will make life ... interesting ... if the OP ever wants to update. I'm not sure I fully understand the original question. However: I have ~950 ports on the current box. At one point I lost /var/db/pkg and needed to rebuild. Remembering some of what was installed was easy - OpenOffice, FireFox, java, gnome/kde, etc., all of which draw in large numbers of (cummonly-used) dependencies. But there were others I would have had no hope of even remembering I had installed. Then I realized I still had /usr/ports/distfiles, and most of the tarball names give you enough clue you can correctly guess the package from /usr/ports INDEX. If I knew anything about the MASTER_SITES (I think) variable(s ?) I could porbably have written a script. (For those who go this route, the "pkg_sort" program that comes with portupgrade will be useful.) Robert huff
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