Recovering loss of /var/db/pkg ?

[Robert Huff]

Lowell Gilbert writes:

>  > /var/db/pkg is long gone and there is no backup. It was not copied to  
>  > new a machine.
>  >
>  > Is there is any hope of being able to use the ports or packages
>  > system in a meangingful way again?
>
>  You can do a forced reinstall of all your ports, and you'll end
>  up with a repopulated ports database.  It will take a lot of
>  clock time, but not much human time.

	Assuming everything goes cleanly.

>  It's not necessarily easy to figure out what all of the ports
>  were, but there are a number of choices.

	It will make life ... interesting ... if the OP ever wants to
update.
	I'm not sure I fully understand the original question.
However: I have ~950 ports on the current box.  At one point I lost
/var/db/pkg and needed to rebuild.  Remembering some of what was
installed was easy - OpenOffice, FireFox, java, gnome/kde, etc., all
of which draw in large numbers of (cummonly-used) dependencies.
	But there were others I would have had no hope of even
remembering I had installed.  Then I realized I still had
/usr/ports/distfiles, and most of the tarball names give you enough
clue you can correctly guess the package from /usr/ports INDEX.  If
I knew anything about the MASTER_SITES (I think) variable(s ?) I
could porbably have written a script.  (For those who go this route,
the "pkg_sort" program that comes with portupgrade will be useful.)


				Robert huff