Polluted my new FreeBSD install!

So, for some stupid reason, I decided to install the Lagrange port, without considering what it means...

Before I realized what was happending, it pulled in a big chunk of gnu crap - hundreds of files... I don't know what I was thinking. A few minutes later I slapped my head and ctrl-c'd out of make, and now have a crapload of junk libraries, includes, docs, etc.

I suppose it's not the end of the world, and perhaps I will search for all the files created within the few minutes of the incident, and maybe delete them. Carefully. Or just ignore them I suppose.

I clearly need to learn more about boot environments, jails and ZFS snapshots... I took a recursive snapshot earlier, but looking at it in .zfs/ hierarchy just showed the current state. I feel a bit stupid: after reading and watching youtube for a few hours, I still don't get why, or how to go about restoring from a recursive snapshot. But I think a boot environment is just for that...

Posted in: s/FreeBSD

🚀 stack

2023-10-06 · 7 months ago · 👍

4 Comments ↓

🐐 drh3xx · 2023-10-06 at 11:14:

As it was my recommendation... sorry. I do think both it and Amfora are both great gemini browsers though.

🦀 jeang3nie · 2023-10-06 at 15:36:

Probably too late to say this now, but for most users I'd recommend packages over ports. There's a few reasons for this.

One of the things I don't like about installing from ports is that you don't get to see what all is going to be pulled in as dependencies or build dependencies (yes, FreeBSD has to deal with this just like Linux). You can get around this by installing ports using portmaster (ports-mgmt/portmaster) as it will tell you what actions it is going to take and give you a chance to say yes or no. I like portmaster over the other similar tools because it's lightweight and has few dependencies itself.

Ports and packages don't mix well. Packages get built quarterly, from a special quarterly branch of the ports tree. That means that unless you set up your ports tree to follow that branch then they will be out of sync, usually with ports having newer versions. So you really should commit to using either packages or ports, and if you intend to run ports be forewarned that you're going to spend a *lot* of time compiling.

One of the cool things about FreeBSD is that almost every mistake is recoverable. In a worst case scenario, where your packages are hopelessly screwed up, you can take the drastic action of removing /usr/local, rebuilding the package database and starting over from scratch without affecting the base system at all. That's one of the benefits of having base and ports separated from each other.

🚀 stack [OP] · 2023-10-06 at 17:27:

@jeang3nie, I didn't realize there was a package of Lagrange... For some reason it stuck in my head that there was a port. Lagrange is one of the few 'luxuries' I got used to, and using Amfora for a day made me really miss it. The only other ports I've been using are dwm, as I need to recompile it with every configuration

Ah, editing this from Lagrange. Amfora has a bug in the input field - if you arrow back and try to insert, it shows an incorrect character which you can't see until you commit. Abandonware is a bitch. Lagrange's ability to populate the input box with previous contents is really nice.

🦀 jeang3nie · 2023-10-06 at 18:31:

yeah, it's disappointing that Android isn't maintained anymore. We need something to fill that space.