Un-GNOME-ing a FreeBSD box

[Rob]

Brett Glass wrote:
> A client of mine has a headless FreeBSD server which is intended just
> to be a Web and mail server. It has no need for a GUI and it wouldn't
> be a good idea to run one on it. But this week, a friend of his (who 
> too much and too little at the same time) told him, "I hear you have
> a FreeBSD machine. Have you tried GNOME? Why don't you install it?"
> 
> And so, the client went to the /usr/ports/x11 directory on his FreeBSD
> box, found a directory for GNOME, and typed "make install".
> 
> He didn't know what he was letting himself in for.
> 
> Between GNOME itself and the many ports on which it depended, there was 
> so much software to build that the process took overnight to finish. And 
> when it was done, it had consumed 25% of the space on the machine's hard 
> drive. The "pkg_info" utility produced a list of installed ports that was
> many screens long.
> 
> And after all that, he couldn't even use GNOME, because the machine was 
> headless and he didn't have another machine that was running an X server 
> (not that it's a good idea to run a GUI desktop remotely anyway).
> 
> He went to the directory from which he thought he had installed GNOME, 
> and typed "make deinstall". This removed GNOME, but none of the ports 
> on which it depended. His hard disk was still glutted with useless junk.
> 
> So, he called me up and asked me to set things right. Trouble is, I am
> not sure how to get the system to remove not only the remainder of the
> GNOME desktop but all of the ports it brought in as dependencies -- while 
> at the same time not removing the ports upon which other packages on the 
> server depend. (He's running Apache with PHP and MySQL, as well as some
> ISC network utilities such as ISC-dhcpd.)
> 
> What's the best way to un-GNOME his system automatically? Or would it
> be simpler to tell him to save his configuration files and reinstall 
> the OS from scratch -- as if his hard drive had crashed?

If that's the last that has been installed on this machine, use pkg_glob to
find out all ports that have been installed after a certain date.
In 'man pkg_glob' you find:

   pkg_glob '>=2001-09-20 08:00'
            Everything that was installed after
            2001-09-20 08:00:00 (local time).

Then pkg_delete everything in this list.
Rob.