/usr/ports & portupgrade when only using packages

[Adam J Richardson]

Michael C. Cambria wrote:
> I need to set up a system that can only use packages.   I've always used 
> ports, so I'm not exactly sure if I'm doing things properly.
> 
> Should I (do I need to) use portsnap to populate /usr/ports?  Unless I 
> really need something that doesn't have a pkg available, I will not be 
> using ports.
> 
> I've always used portupgrade, and plan to do so, using -PP (only 
> packages) for this setup.  My first question is should I?
> 
> Doing'pkg_add -r portupgrade' and it installed fine.
> Using pkgdb -F however, resulted in these messages:
> 
> bsd# pkgdb -F
> cd: can't cd to /usr/ports
> cd: can't cd to /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portupgrade
> cd: can't cd to /usr/ports
> ---->  Chcecking the package registry database
> 
> Any help appreciated.

Hi Mike.

Let me see if I've got this... you want to be able to install packages, 
but not ports.

Well, that's easy...

# rm -R /usr/ports

Saves you a load of disk space, too. The only downside is you get 
slightly older versions of software with packages.

Oh, and don't use portsnap, it'll undo that "rm -R" for you. Using 
"portupgrade -PP" works perfectly well on those rare occasions when I 
want to install a package rather than a port.

I guess you could delete all executables matching "port*", but that 
might be going too far.

You could get rid of two of those error messages by doing a:

# mkdir /usr/ports

Regards,
Adam J Richardson