Rebuilding /var/db/pkg

[Robertsen A. Riehle]

On Thursday 25 May 2006 19:03, John Nielsen wrote:
> Quoting Robert Huff <roberthuff at rcn.com>:
> > Robertsen A. Riehle writes:
> >>  Say that the /var/db/pkg directory had been recursively erased
> >>  off of a workstation that had ~300 packages on it.  And, let's
> >>  hypothetically say that this workstation's ports tree was up to
> >>  date as of yesterday.  Is there any hope of rectifying this or is
> >>  this workstation is a static ports state forever???
> >
> > 	1) Is there no back-up?
> > 	2) Unless you clear it regularly, look in
>
> Also if you act before the weekly(?) periodic script rebuilds the
> locate database, you could use the output of "locate /var/db/pkg" to
> help you determine what was there.
This is really good idea except the locate database was already updated.  


> > /usr/ports/distfiles.  On my system, I'd also check pkgtools.conf.
> > Start with things with a lot of dependencies (OpenOffice, Mozilla,
> > KDE/gnome, Java, Emacs, etc.) and reinstall by hand.
It appears that this is really the only way to solve the problem.  Except, if 
there is nothing in /var/db/pkg, make install does nothing.   So, I tried  
pkg_add -r gcc41 and the following result revealed a more substantial problem.

 su-2.05b# pkg_add -r gcc41  
(Before I compile all of KDE and find out that it didn't work, I decided to 
try something small...)

Fetching 
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-5-stable/Latest/gcc41.tbz...
/var: write failed, filesystem is full
info/gcc41/gccint.info: Write error: No space left on device
 Done.
^C
/var: write failed, filesystem is full
Signal 2 received, cleaning up..

But....
su-2.05b# df -h /var
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s2d    248M    183M     45M    80%    /var

Surely, a gcc package doesn't take up 45M.  What is going on here?