pkg_version: the package info for package '...' is corrupt

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

Ok, first, my apologies to Leslie Jensen about the e-mail bounce.  It is
nothing personal, believe me.  I just have a personal policy of locally
blacklisting any and all domains that send me spam.  (Apparently, at one
time or another, I received some spam from bjare.net.)  I believe that
if _everybody_... or even just 10% of everybody... did as I do, then
ISPs would finally take seriously their spam outflow problems.  (Most
of them don't at present, and that explains why there is so much spam.)

Now, as regards to "pkg_version" versus "pkg version" I have never even
seen the latter, so I don't know a damn thing about that.  Furthermore,
although there does appear to be an executable named /usr/sbin/pkg
present on my system, whatever the heck it is, it does not seem to have
any associated man page. :-(

So anyway, I have never used it, I don't know what it even does, and I
would still not know how to use it, even if you held a gun to my head.

Regarding Julien Laffaye comment(s) relating to "pkgng", I have also
never even heard of that before now.  What is it and where do I get it?
And if it is so wonderful... and if what I am using is considered "old"...
then why isn't this new "pkgng" thing the default in/on 9.1-RELEASE?
(I also apparently have no man page for anything called "pkgng" on my
system.)

Anyway, athough I do thank both Leslie Jensen and Julien Laffaye for
their comments and attempts to help, I still am in DIRE need of an answer
to my original question.  I have, apparently, over 50 of my installed
ports that pkg_version is now telling me are in some *unspecified way*
"corrupt" and I still need (and am desperately begging for) someone to
tell me how to resolve that problem, exactly.

As I have said, I _do_ have a recent full system backup, but that doesn't
help me unless and until someone tells me which file or files from that,
exactly, I should be restoring in order to eliminate this problem.

Could someone kindly do that, please?


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  I do most seriously wonder if whoever engineered the FreeBSD ports
system ever realized how dramatically UNhelpful a message like the following
actually is:

    pkg_version: the package info for package 'evince-2.32.0_9' is corrupt

I do not intend to offend anyone, but to be frank, this is the kind of a
message I would expect out of a Windows system, i.e. a message that some-
thing is broken, but providing -zero- details regarding what exactly is
broken, where it is located, or, most importantly, how to begin to fix the
problem.

When I am using Windows, I _expect_ to be treated like a luser... i.e.
one who cannot be trusted with too much information.

When I am using any kind of *NIX system however, I tend to expect the exact
opposite, and am rather unhappy when critical information is hidden from
me.