I performed an rm -r on /var/lib/pkg

[RW]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:26:19 -0600
James <jamesh at lanl.gov> 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.