I relied on the fact that man page/help of reclaim said it would not remove active installs. So, having read that, I assumed it was unable to damage the running setup and I assumed it would only remove everything inactive, compile stuff, etc.
That was a mistake I now know. Reclaim will remove active unrequested installs. But the help/man does not say so. G Sent from my iPhone > On 9 May 2021, at 21:26, Daniel J. Luke <[email protected]> wrote: > > On May 9, 2021, at 12:20 PM, Gerben Wierda via macports-users > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Anyway, the hard lesson was: reclaim is not ’safe’. I thought, reclaim >> would only remove inactive installs, but it removed active ones as well. >> >> It is not possible for me to retrace what went wrong exactly, sadly. > > The first thing reclaim does is this: > > ---> Checking for unnecessary unrequested ports > Unrequested ports without requested dependents found: > > If you (like me) have an MacPorts install that pre-dates the requested flag, > you'll have a bunch of ports in that list that you don't actually want > uninstalled. For reclaim to work best, you need to do `port setrequested` on > the ports you want to always keep - then the list of ports you see there will > be stuff that got installed that you no longer need. (You can also mark > things 'unrequested', see the port manpage - so you can fix things up if you > mistakenly mark something requested that you don't want). > > Or, you can just hit 'n' for the first prompt. > > -- > Daniel J. Luke >
