From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Oct 12 20:49:13 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 474F516A41B for ; Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:49:13 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from fbsd06+PG=b4007a3d@mlists.homeunix.com) Received: from turtle-out.mxes.net (turtle-out.mxes.net [216.86.168.191]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2256C13C474 for ; Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:49:13 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from fbsd06+PG=b4007a3d@mlists.homeunix.com) Received: from mxout-04.mxes.net (mxout-04.mxes.net [216.86.168.179]) by turtle-in.mxes.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id BFC14164238 for ; Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:19:46 -0400 (EDT) Received: from gumby.homeunix.com. (unknown [87.81.140.128]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by smtp.mxes.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0DE92D05BD for ; Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:19:44 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:19:41 +0100 From: RW To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Message-ID: <20071012211941.29038bc2@gumby.homeunix.com.> In-Reply-To: <1192134379.33933.9.camel@secretariat.lanl.gov> References: <1192134379.33933.9.camel@secretariat.lanl.gov> X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.0.0 (GTK+ 2.10.14; i386-portbld-freebsd6.2) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: I performed an rm -r on /var/lib/pkg X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:49:13 -0000 On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:26:19 -0600 James wrote: > Call it a moment of sheer stupidity, call it a misremembering, call it > whatever you want (and I imagine I'll hear a few different ones), but > I just did an rm -r /var/lib/pkg. > > Before I type anything to damage things further, does anyone have any > suggestions as to how to recover from this? I have other FreeBSD boxes > available to me, none with the same pkg list, though. I'll be reading > man pkgdb in the meantime.. This came up recently in another thread, and what seemed to be the best solution to me, was this: 1. work out which leaf-ports you actually need - don't worry about the dependencies. 2. at your leisure build new packages under a chroot environment, or on another machine. 3. back-up /usr/local/etc (or the whole of /usr/local) 4. rm -rf /usr/local/* 5. Restore /usr/local/etc and install packages. (If you have xorg installed, and it's not up-to-date, you may need to consider /usr/X11R6 too) This seems to be a good solution, it avoids more than a few minutes disruption, avoids leaving any orphaned files,and most importantly makes sure that all of the installed package have an entry in /var/db/pkg. If you miss any of these entries, it may cause a lot of trouble down the line.