portmaster installation trampling on my binary packages???

[RW]

On Sun, 19 Mar 2017 18:35:26 +0000
Ethan Grammatikidis wrote:

> Hi. I'm quite new to FreeBSD. I'm getting a system up & running
> slowly, working around my chronic fatigue. Today I'm updating for the
> first time. Base system and pkg update appeared to go well. I haven't
> rebooted, wanting to get everything done before reboot.
> 
> https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ports-using.html
> This handook page says "ports-mgmt/portmaster is a very small utility
> for upgrading installed ports. It is designed to use the tools
> installed with the FreeBSD base system without depending on other
> ports or databases." That sounds just fine to me, so I did the usual
> to install portmaster, cd to its directory, and make install clean. 
> 
> So far, so good. Then I ran portmaster -a, and it all went
> pear-shaped. 

When you do a make install you are installing a package; all
other things being equal, there's really no difference between that and
installing a package file created on the FreeBSD build machines.  

When you run portmaster -a you are telling it to upgrade all your
installed packages that are not up-to-date with your ports tree
using ports. Since pkg uses a quarterly branch by default, that's likely
to be very different to the current tree, so it's likely to be a major
rebuild. 

If portmaster upgraded anything, you need to either let it complete, or
put everything back to the previous state.  If no one has a better
suggestion you could just use pkg to deinstall everything, then
reinstall what you want.