pkg format change??

[doug at safeport.com]

I have a 9.2 system with 'FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE #0 r255898'. In trying to add a 
python module I can neither built it or do a pkg install.

Building:

pkg-static: Invalid manifest format: could not find expected ':'
*** [fake-pkg] Error code 74

Stop in /usr/ports/devel/py-setuptools27.
*** [build-depends] Error code 1

Stop in /usr/ports/databases/py-MySQLdb.
*** [stage] Error code 1

I found this:

Bryan Drewery bdrewery at FreeBSD.org
Thu Aug 14 15:01:08 UTC 2014

> This came up in #pkgng on freenode as well. Your Pkg is probably too
> old. Check with 'pkg -v'. The current release is at 1.3.6 now. You're
> likely running 1.1. Upgrade Pkg to support the new JSON format for the
> manifest.

Sure enough: pkg -v yields 1.1.4. My problem (if not already obvious) there is 
no way to update pkg. Build yields the same error. Neither 'pkg install' or 
pkg_add will work. I trust there was a good reason to make the format change 
mentioned above within a release and in such as way as to invalidate the 
package/port db on a working system..

This is not critical (for me) and is the reason I never do anything on a 
production system that I have not tested. This is my primary workstation, so I 
will just wait until I switch to 10.0 and rebuild from scratch. But really, an 
integral part of the system should be backward compatible with supported 
releases.

_____
Douglas Denault
http://www.safeport.com
doug at safeport.com
Voice: 301-217-9220
   Fax: 301-217-9277