Re: What is expected for "pkg check -ma 2>&1 | less" results?

From: Dag-Erling_Smørgrav <des_at_FreeBSD.org>
Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:48:16 UTC
Mark Millard <marklmi@yahoo.com> writes:
> When I just tried:
>
> # pkg check -ma 2>&1 | less
>
> for the first time . . .
> 
> [lots of spurious differences]

This happens because pkg fails to skip the checks for packages which
don't have these metadata, and most packages don't have them because pkg
only recently (2.4.1, last November) started recording them and we don't
rebuild all packages every time pkg is updated, and even if we rebuild
the package, your installed copy doesn't get updated unless the version
has increased.  If you really want to you can `pkg upgrade -fy` to force
a complete reinstall, which will reduce the number of spurious warnings
from `pkg check -m`, but not completely eliminate them.  A better
solution is to just not run `pkg check -m`.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des@FreeBSD.org