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

[Mel]

On Saturday 13 October 2007 02:13:49 RW wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 23:13:58 +0200
>
> Mel <fbsd.questions at rachie.is-a-geek.net> wrote:
> > On Friday 12 October 2007 22:19:41 RW wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > Why would you go through 3-5 when you can just
> > mv /chroot/build/directory/var/db/pkg /var/db/pkg ?
>
> For the reasons that that you snipped off the bottom of my post.
>
> > >                  ... 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.
>
> /chroot/build/directory/var/db/pkg is only a rough guess as to
> what was actually installed under /usr/local/.

So don't guess if you're that paranoid. It can be much much harder to restore 
some directories under /usr/local to a working state, 
like /usr/local/pgsql, /usr/local/www and some perl ports like rrd.

Depending how long builds take, it may be faster let a script run 
over /usr/ports/*/* that runs make generate-plist for each port, appends 
grep -v '^@' ${TMPPLIST} into a file, thus building an index of every file 
that a port can install, then let a script run over /usr/local that queries 
that index for each file it encounters. Like I said, for the ultra paranoid.

> Maybe some forgotten 
> dependency doesn't get included in the new build.  A year from now you
> may find odd build problems, or new port installs may use orphaned
> files with critical vulnerabilities that portaudit can't detect.

Nope. Orphaned files create stale deps, which are easily found with pkgdb -F, 
because the dependency check checks if ${LOCALBASE}/bin/foo exists and if it 
does adds the dependency to /var/db/pkg.
Also, `make missing' for a given port easily lists all dependencies that 
aren't in $PKG_DBDIR, so if you run make missing after a new install for a 
while, you'll easily identify those.

-- 
Mel