Re: removing a pkg from pkg database without deleting the pkg itself

On 04/04/2022 16:27, tech-lists wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 03:35:16PM +0200, Stefan Esser wrote:
>> Am 04.04.22 um 15:26 schrieb tech-lists:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'd like to remove a pkg entry from the database so it's not managed 
>>> by pkg.
>>
>> The simplest way to exclude an installed package from being managed
>> by pkg is to use "pkg lock":
>>
>> # pkg lock -y <pkgname>
>>
>> See "man pkg-lock" for more details.
> 
> That will work for a time, but won't it stop other packages linked to it 
> from being updated?
> 
> The packages in question are nextcloud and drupal.
> 
> The other thing is that even with pkg lock, I seem to recollect it'll 
> still show up in packages-that-
> need-upgrading in the daily cronjob. I might be wrong about that though.

pkg(8) doesn't really have a concept of giving up management of a 
package that it originally installed.

What you could do is use 'pkg info' to generate a list of the files 
installed by the package.  Feed that into tar(1) to create a backup, 
then use pkg(8) to delete the package and tar to recover the files from 
your backup.  There will be a short service outage while you do that: if 
that's not acceptable then you can probably adapt the procedure by using 
tar(1) or similar to copy the package files to an alternate filesystem 
location, making whatever config changes you need to in your webserver 
and application config to serve the site from the new location, and then 
deleting the original package.

	Cheers,

	Matthew