Recursively Deinstalling and Upgrading Packages/Ports without Breaking Dependencies?

[Paul Mather]

On Jan 27, 2015, at 3:13 AM, Chris Knight <stryqx at gmail.com> wrote:

> Howdy,
> 
> On 27 January 2015 at 18:17, Matthew Seaman
> <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 2015/01/26 23:28, Pierre-Luc Drouin wrote:
>>> With portupgrade, I used to use "pkg_deinstall -R" to deinstall a
>>> package and its dependencies while preserving the packages on which
>>> other packages were depending on. With pkgng, the behaviour of
>>> "pkg_deinstall -R" changed and this command is now breaking
>>> dependencies. Is there a new method to safely remove packages recursively?
>> 
>>  # pkg delete pkgname
>>  # pkg autoremove
>> 
> That only works if the dependencies were added as automatic
> dependencies. Won't work if the dependency wasn't automatically added
> as part of the package's prerequisites for installation.

The ports-mgmt/pkg_cutleaves port will let you trim your installed 
packages, working inwards from outer leaf packages.  It's also possible 
to designate a list of packages to pkg_cutleaves that you always want 
to retain, so as to speed up trimming by not presenting these (and 
anything they depend upon) as candidates for removal.

Cheers,

Paul.