something bad clearly happened in that machine if it's able to selfhost build itself and work, except etcupdate. and that for a long time
i don't see any reason getting pissed about his machine mysteriously not working, despite i haven't broken any machine myself since i installed first fbsd, 4.6 unsure how to go from here. unsure if src.conf or make.conf matters here if this happens in currently actively supported fbsd release, maybe etcupdate needs a bugfix to cleanup for edge cases if it's in unsupported, that should not cause any "pissages" either. fix is somewhere so, the admin updated files manually because he was not able to get it working? i bet you can recreate it and fix it for future cases since i haven't ever broken etcupdate, i don't know which data it uses as input. but seems like it reads wrong data out of somewhere. and entire machine works, except this? i mean if this was bad upgrade leftover, how to fix? i mean doesn't etcupdate get rework now, for pkgbase. while we do that, maybe it could be made to handle this. or maybe even given non-destructive nuke mode so people can start clean i don't think it's really entirely user error, considering he didn't break the machine i'm curious too. at worst you could do other install in another machine and compare dirs as something must differ there. then, according to findings, fix the old machine. maybe while doing this, some new bugfix idea appears but hell with getting mad over machine. he's pissed too, everyone's pissed, server is not working and no productive work have been done here maybe something got lost in translation too
