On Fri, 12 Jun 1998, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> "S.J. Borrill" writes:
> > I'm finding that pkg_add is not storing the installation information in
> > /var/db/pkg/<package name>. I'm using the UVM userland and a UVM current
> > kernel. This failure mean that pkg_info and pkg_delete don't work, but
> > also means that any packages which have dependencies don't work properly.
> > 
> > Anyone else seen this problem?
> 
> I've not had this difficulty. Perhaps you are running the pkg tools as 
> non-root and have a permissions problem or some such?

Nope, running as root. I've even tried setting PKG_DBDIR and PKG_PREFIX
appropriately. However, further investigation shows that it's only failing
on X packages that it's trying to install in /usr/X11R6 which on my system
is a symbolic link to /usr/X11R6.3 (as is /usr/X11R6.1). 

The reason it's not entering anything in /var/db/pkg is that it is not
actually installing anything, so my original explanation was wrong.

By removing X11R6 as a symbolic link and creating /usr/X11R6 as an empty
directory allowed the package to be installed. Therefore the problem is
actually that pkg_add won't follow symbolic links which I can't see being
alluded to in the man pages.

I got around this by using the -p option to pkg_add.

Stephen