That's a first, and if my futile searches are any indicator, a first ever for anyone.

Everything I use in #FreeBSD is installed from ports, not pkg, yet I somehow managed to bork my pkg database so badly that pkg-static keeps randomly removing vital packages like www/firefox and x11/xorg-server while upgrading (and later reinstalling) completely unrelated ports.

#FreeBSD Ahah. The first `pkg` in my path is /usr/sbin/pkg from base, while the first `pkg-static` is /usr/local/sbin/pkg-static from ports-mgmt/pkg, the two sources got out of sync (ports a higher version number than base), ports-mgmt/portmaster explicitly uses pkg-static, and I never noticed which `pkg` and `pkg-static` I was using outside of that. Yep, that would do it.

#FreeBSD While I slept, portmaster descended thousands of levels deep into a circular dependencies loop: deskutils/zim > devel/xdg-utils > textproc/xmlto > www/w3m > graphics/imlib2 > graphics/libheif > multimedia/ffmpeg > graphics/libcaca > graphics/imlib2 > graphics/libheif > multimedia/ffmpeg.

Make-installing zim and restarting portmaster without zim somehow broke the circular dependency loop, despite nothing being functionally different.

And it happened again, same descent, but starting with multimedia/ffmpeg4, a dependency of emulators/vice. This being the third time in as many days portmaster has burned me, #FreeBSD Handbook section 4.5.4.2 is set to permanent distrust.

I need to either find a large enough block of time to shave the poudriere yak, use a ports management tool stupider than portmaster, or babysit a sequence of long-running make commands, to get my software back to last Saturday.

I had to `rm /var/db/pkg/*` and re-bootstrap pkg to stop my installed ports from being randomly uninstalled. I did that a few days ago, and it worked.

Now I have my most needed ports reinstalled (installed anew, according to #FreeBSD), and my system is back to mostly normal again.

But because I wiped out my pkg database, I have a few thousand now-untracked binaries that I need to sort through, finding out the hard way which ports installed them.