On Fri, Oct 30, 2026 at 10:30:35AM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: > On 10/28/26 06:20, Robert Alessi wrote: > > Answering to myself with one more question. > > > > A diff between the packages that I have and the same taken from 8.0 > > shows that quite a lot of packages have changed. > > > > As I keep a list from pkg_info -mz in my backups, I wonder if a > > solution would not be to first remove everything with pkg_delete -X, > > then do sysupgrade -R 80 and finally reinstall all my packages from > > the list. > > > > Any thoughts about this course of action? > > > > Many thanks, > > > > R > >
[...] > First of all... evaluate your "absolutely need to have -stable" statement. In fact, I had little choice: I have two disks in my laptop, one for running -release and the other one with -current. So my mistake left me with two -current systems on the same machine! (For the record, I need this layout to build and maintain the “native” TeX Live for OpenBSD.) > But, if you really decide you must run -stable, here are the options I see: > > * You should have good backups. Follow the process you would follow if your > storage had failed to rebuild your system back to the desired state and date. > If you can't do that -- recognize you are doing things wrong, and > running -stable isn't your biggest problem. If you do have a backup, but > restoring from it scares you...you don't have a backup. You are absolutely right. Yes, I keep good and reliable backups, and so I could try to revert in absolute confidence. Here's what I did, based on the list from "pkg_info -mz" which is run by my backup scripts every time: pkg_delete -X sysupgrade -n -R 8.0 -f sysmerge On reboot, sysclean was clever enough to tell me that I had a couple of libraries ahead. Very nice! Same for one system user/group to be deleted: sysclean told me about it, and as sysmerge did nothing on this user/group, I assumed it had been installed by -curent. So I removed what had to be removed before reinstalling all the previously deleted pkgs. I must say it worked to perfection! > * Being we aren't very far past -release, you may have luck removing existing > packages, forcing a downgrade to 8.0-release, and reinstalling the packages. > I'd give this a "very likely to succeed" rating...but I've left weasel words > in there to cover my tail if it blows up on you. Fortunately, it didn't! > * Complete reinstall -- probably to another disk, so you have the old one for > reference. Install packages, copy config files and data...done. This was my scenario in case reverting would have failed. Anyway, this is the second time in 6 months I make the same mistake. Last time, it was on a VM that I have at openbsd.amsterdam. But I decided to run -current for 6 months before catching up -release, which worked nicely, as expected. Thank you, -- Robert > Nick.
