Desktop rebuild

[Derrick Ryalls]

On 4/27/07, illoai at gmail.com <illoai at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27/04/07, Derrick Ryalls <ryallsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have a laptop that I am currently updating world to the latest from
> > the v6 branch, once that is done I want to completely start fresh with
> > the GUI.  Right now I have gnome in a mostly working state, a mostly
> > out of date KDE and a bunch of other random crud I have installed over
> > the last 16 months or so.  Instead of trying to use portupgrade and
> > have it fail out/fix/restart, I was thinking life would be easier if I
> > just removed anything graphical and start that from scratch.  This way
> > all my settings/data remain intact and I can just do a pkg install the
> > new stuff.
> >
> > Is anyone aware of a quick/safe way of blowing away nearly all
> > installed apps as such to start from near scratch.  I do use bash and
> > probably a couple other non-GUI installs, so I didn't necessarily want
> > to kill _all_ installed ports/pkgs but I might be willing to do that
> > if needed.
> >
> > Any thought on the best way to approach this?
>
> The best method I have come up with is to first
> gather a list of leaf packages with ports-mgmt/portmaster:
> $ portmaster -l
>
> and then (assuming you have ports-mgmt/portupgrade
> installed):
> $ pkg_deinstall -r <leaf pkg names>
> or
> $ pkg_delete -r <leaf pkg names>
>
> ports-mgmt/pkg_cutleaves is a bit overly thorough
> (and underly[1] conservative) for my tastes, but may
> be more your style.
>
> This shouldn't delete anything required by the stuff
> you want to keep and should clean out most of the
> kipple.  Multiple runs are suggested and deleting
> root packages (as listed under portmaster -l) most
> likely won't harm anything (though some of them
> may be reinstalled when you upgrade).
>
> pkg_deinstall has the advantage of being able to issue
> $ pkg_deinstall -Rr kde*
> , which will delete anything requiring kde and required by
> kde (at least that is not required by some other package),
> and the disadvantage of requiring that both perl and ruby
> be installed.
>

I ended up just creating a new user with a /bin/sh shell, doing a
pkg_delete -a and reinstalling the apps.  I was very impressed with
how quickly pkg_add -r xorg and such (from the handbook) ran and got
me back to a working desktop.  Just need to selectively add any app I
really want reinstalled now.  Though I did run into an issue with
portupgrade and needed to delete its database, per the entry in
UPDATING.