Gilles Gravier wrote:
>Explain that statement?
>
>Gilles.

>Geert Hendrickx wrote:
>> Congratulations, you just lost all support from netbsd/pkgsrc mailing
>> lists.
>>
>> 	Geert

I think what Geert is trying to tell you in a humourous manner is that what
you suggest is not a very good idea. However, the way he tries to tell you
that is in itself not a very good idea. 15 years of Usenet experience tells
me that when someone asks a silly question in earnest, it is bad style to
respond with sarcasm - the sarcasm is at best lost on the recipient, and
at worst alienates the recipient, which is counter-productive in so many
ways.

(If Geert seriously thinks that asking silly questions on netbsd-users is
enough to disqualify a NetBSD user from support, and if that attitude is
approved by the NetBSD Project, then I think it is time for us "ordinary"
dumb users to set up a NetBSD user society that is detached from netbsd.org
itself. If anyone cares about why I am saying this then ask me, otherwise
I won't bore you with more details. Especially not because I think and
hope that both conditions in the beginning of this parenthetical remark
are demonstrably false.)

As for the technical details, I suppose by losing the pkg db stuff in /var,
you lost all track of installed packages and their relations. I'm not sure
though. I have used rm -rf /var/db/pkg /usr/pkg now and then to get rid of
packages quickly, and would frankly like to know too what is intrinsically
wrong with that method. It's not like the pkg system is perfect in the
first place, and as far as I can tell, doing this should clean out everything
package-related quite nicely, except for stuff added to /etc perhaps.

Just to give you all a chance of having a good laugh at my expense, I'll
finish by telling how *I* manage my packages, feel free to point a finger
of your choice at me:

To get a list of packages I have installed and want to keep, I do:
pkg_info -B -a |grep PKGPATH|sed 's/PKGPATH=//' >pkgs_i_want_to_have

To clear out all the packages, I do:
pkg_info -a|sed 's/ .*//'|tail -r|while read p ; do pkg_delete $p ; done

I edit pkgs_i_want_to_have as needed, then:
cat pkgs_i_want_to_have|
(while read pp ; do cd /usr/pkgsrc/$pp ; make && make install ; done)

I am sure there are terrific pkg tools to do this, but my method appears
to work, and therefore I have little incentive to bother with changing it.

-Lasse