On Sun, 17 Aug 2025, Ryan Carsten Schmidt wrote:

> > Notwithstanding that though, how may this problem be remedied?
> 
> The only way I can think of is uninstalling all ports, deleting the 
> registry, and installing ports again, but even uninstalling the ports 
> will probably not work with a corrupted registry. Does anybody else have 
> a better idea?

Sorry for the delay in replying, but a few health-related issues came up 
(to be expected when you turn 73 soon, I guess).

OK, here's the situation and my proposed solution; comments welcomed:

Corruption noticed on 11/8/25 (that's 11th August, for the Americans 
here), but my backups only went as far back as 29/8 at the time i.e.  no 
useful backups...  There was no error code, just the message "an invalid 
entry was passed" (although I do get "surplus entry blah blah in index 
file" when poking around a bit, so plainly the indices are corrupt.

As an aside, seeing as MacPorts uses SQLite would it be a good idea to use 
the internal ".backup" and ".restore" commands for times like this?

Anyway, here's my plan:

* Move aside /opt/local (it's only used by MP on this box, but does MP
  use files anywhere else?).

* Reinstall MP to recreate an empty database etc.

* Run "port install" as required e.g. gnuplot, enscript, etc, and
  let MP take care of the dependencies (Perl, Python, ZSH etc are
  in the base system anyway, so they can wait).

* Blow away the saved /opt/local at some time.

This has the advantage of cleaning out any crud accumulated over the 
years, but I'm not sure about XQuartz (I guess I'll soon find out).

Have I missed anything?

Thanks.

-- Dave

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