extracting base names from package listing

[RW]

On Wednesday 20 September 2006 19:45, Andrew Gould wrote:
> pkg_info provides a nice listing of package names that
> include version numbers.  I'd like to have a list of
> the names without the version numbers so that I can
> write a script to install the newer versions after a
> clean installation.
>
> Looking at the package names, I'm having a hard time
> coming up with an algorithm for separating the package
> names from the version numbers.  Many package names
> have dashes (postgresql-server), and some have letters
> in the version numbers (libid3tag-0.15.1b).
>
> Does anyone have a good way of separating the package
> names from the version numbers?
>
> Is there a better way of identifying and installing a
> set of packages after a clean installation?

What you actually want is the origins, pkg_info -oq "*" will give you that.

What I think is a better idea is to get a list of the leaf origins, and let 
the ports sytem sort out the rest itself - you may end up with a cleaner set 
of dependencies. See the thread "Moving to new PC" above for a way to get 
these from portmanager.