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Greg Troxel wrote:
>   fwiw, it's *extremely* convenient to be able to rm -rf /usr/pkg and
>   /var/db/pkg and start from scratch, on any pkgsrc system, anywhere.
> 
> I agree, and I do this, but usually 'pkg_delete -r \*', and then
> delete crud from /usr/pkg, saving etc.

IMHO, the mere idea that it may be desirable to rm -rf /usr/pkg and rebuild it 
completely, makes me think that there must be something flawed with the pkgsrc 
system - not *fundamentally* flawed, but at least very incomplete.

I've been administering several FreeBSD servers for the last three years, and 
"portupgrade" (not a part of the base FreeBSD port system, I know) helped me a 
lot. In these three years, I've never had to rebuild my ports from scratch, so 
the idea seems very unnatural to me. I cannot even start to imagine deleting 500 
installed packages from a server, and telling my users to wait a couple of weeks 
till everything is recompiled and working again.

I should add that I've been bitten rather badly by "make update" in pkgsrc (as a 
consequence of which I'm currently unable to reinstall xpm on one Solaris 8 
server), because it starts by deleting a port and its dependencies, without 
first making sure that it will be able to install the new versions or restore 
the old ones.

But I agree that I am not a pkgsrc expert, as I tried it, with more or less 
success, only on thre "exotic" platforms (Solaris 7, Solaris 8, AIX 5). Just my 
2 cents...

Laurent.

-- 

     Laurent DAVERIO
     Centre de Recherche en Informatique
     de l'École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (CRI-ENSMP)
     35, Rue Saint-Honoré
     77305 FONTAINEBLEAU CEDEX
     FRANCE                               Tel:    (+33|0) 1.64.69.48.37
                                          Fax:    (+33|0) 1.64.69.48.47
                                          E-mail: laurent@daverio.net
                                          http://daverio.net/
					 La Page Trad : http://trad.org/



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