Recovering loss of /var/db/pkg ?

[Lowell Gilbert]

Mark Stosberg <mark at summersault.com> writes:

> I'll just say it plainly:
>
> /var/db/pkg is long gone and there is no backup. It was not copied to  
> new a machine.
>
> Is there is any hope of being able to use the ports or packages system in a
> meangingful way again?
>
> My sense is that some recovery is possible, but may be prohibitively expensive.

You can do a forced reinstall of all your ports, and you'll end up with
a repopulated ports database.  It will take a lot of clock time, but not
much human time.

It's not necessarily easy to figure out what all of the ports were, but
there are a number of choices.  If you can wipe out most of /usr/local
and rebuild the ports, you can reinstall everything you want, and the
database will be repopulated in the process.  That's the easiest
approach to understand, but involves considerable downtime.  Another
alternative would be to install all the ports to a non-standard PREFIX,
and use the results of that to tell you which ports need to be
reinstalled to the standard PREFIX.

-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/