Deleted /var/db -- HELP

Helena · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 7:54 pm Post subject: Deleted /var/db -- HELP

During an OpenOffice merge, in a struggle to free space for the merge, I accidentally deleted /var/db :oops:

. Now of course portage is complaining all the time, e.g. about problems in my world file. Updates are no longer possible, etc :cry:

. All software still works, however, including Gnome

. Is there a way to regenerate /var/db other than recompiling everything? Thx!

freelight · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 8:35 pm Post subject:

Try regenworld. It regenerates the world file. I'm not sure if it will work with the entire /var/db/ directory missing, but give it a shot.
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Genone · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 9:12 pm Post subject:

Helena · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 5:10 am Post subject:

I've already attempted regenworld of course but that does nothing. So I really have to reinstall each and every package?

BTW is there some automated way of making that backup?

Genone · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 9:05 am Post subject:

There is no special mechanism to create a backup of /var/db/pkg you could enable in make.conf or so, because backups are one of those things that can't really be standardized (as people have very different needs/desires on location/frequency/trigger/copies). The simplest solution would be a cronjob that copies /var/db/pkg to a safe location regulary, or create a wrapper around emerge to save it after every session.

Helena · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 11:12 am Post subject:

Genone · Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:26 pm Post subject:

Well, I said there is no reliable way to restore /var/db/pkg, but there are a few hacks floating around these forums to recreate parts of it, so portage at least knows that the packages are installed. Of course that "solution" won't fix everything and is completely unsupported, also it will likely cause portage to leave orpahned files on your system.

Helena · Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2008 4:31 pm Post subject:

Ok I sat down and thought: let's try it. So I went onto a journey full of circular dependencies, emerges of system with the --nodeps option, and later on partly compiling xorg-x11, then satisfying the system dependencies again, continuing xorg-x11 and then trying to compile gnome, unsuccessfully, and so on and on. It all became quite a mess, up to the point where there was no way I could get pango, gtk+ and cairo compiled. And still I had this perfectly running system!

I finally gave up and started a full re-install. It's almost finished now, just not complete because I discovered 2 new bugs (in a stable tree, that is). Aarghh...

Helena · Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2008 6:11 pm Post subject:

To be precise: I discovered 1 new bug and stumbled into another one, that was just opened yesterday.

Oh and did I mention the tricky disabling all USE flags and re-enabling them a few times?

It seems to be even worse than Genone described: not only is there no reliable way to restore your system, there is no way at all... (at least in my case).