Un-GNOME-ing a FreeBSD box

[RW]

On Sunday 12 December 2004 01:54, Brett Glass wrote:
> At 06:42 PM 12/11/2004, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> >That isn't supposed to happen.  If another port has X11 listed as a
> >dependency, "make deinstall" would have said so and refused to remove
> >it..
>
> Which, by the way, is what the owner of the machine is seeing. He's
> listed the ports that were installed by running pkg_info, and is
> laboriously visiting each one's directory and trying to do a
> "make deinstall". But it's refusing to delete things due to dependency
> issues. I'm not sure, but I'll bet that the dependencies here aren't
> a clean, hierarchical tree but rather more of a "web". If there's
> a circular dependency, he's stuck.
>
> Again, I really find it hard to believe that there would be no provision
> for deleting a port AND the ports on which it depends cleanly. I tend
> to use a minimal number of ports and packages, and so didn't realize
> that this was such a difficult thing until now.

There is a way: 

  pkg_deinstall -R gnome 

which delete gnome and all it depends on, except those packages that are 
required by other packages that aren't to be deleted. The pitfalls are that 
you will need to reinstall gnome, and also there might be ports that gnome 
depends on that were usefull leaf ports in their own right. I dont think 
there will be anything like that with gnome, but I'm not entirely sure.  
    
also pkg_deinstall  ">2004-11-20 08:00" 

which removes all packages added after the specified timestamp. 

In either case I would test to see what will go by running pkg_glob first.