Recovering from X "upgrade" disaster - now what?

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 6 Apr 2016, Will Parsons wrote:

> Thank you for the suggestions, even if they failed to solve the
> problem.
>
> Happily, I have now got X working again, but to do so I had to restore
> the entire contents of /usr/local from a backup I had made about 6
> months ago.  I think what this means is that my pkg database is out of
> sync with the actual contents of /usr/local.  What does this mean as
> far as further updating?  I'd just as soon try to resolve the real
> problem, but am understandably reluctant to leave my system crippled
> again.

First, make a full backup of the system as it is.

The easy way to fix the package database is the same thing that might 
resolve the problem.  Reinstall all the packages, either as binaries or 
from ports.  There is a procedure for ports at the end of the portmaster 
man page.  For packages, I want to say it would be 'pkg install -af', 
but I have not tested it.