With regards to recent discussion, here is a little anecdote that came out of the 6.5 to 6.6 upgrade.
On one machine I run bitlbee, an IRC:IM gateway. After upgrading all the ports it left suggestions in the form of copy pasta commands to run to complete the upgrade process, as it does. One of these was rm -rf /var/bitlbee/*. Had I been so stupid as to just run the command, or if the hyper-complicated upgrade script required to support every possibility included a single mistake, all of the settings to connect to my IM accounts (currently constituting the only place some ancient passwords are guaranteed to be saved) would have been lost, where in fact what I had to do about those files was absolutely nothing. There is no fault here. The wording is something like 'you should also run', clearly not 'this is absolutely essential' (because if it was, why wasn't it done already or documented better?), which couldn't make it any clearer that you need to think first why you might want to run that command. There are good reasons not to delete user accounts when removing the software that uses them, for example, which is why pkg_delete doesn't but suggests that you might want to (with copy pasta for your convenience). It's my responsibility to understand the software I'm running, how it works and what effect the things I do will have on it. Nobody would have cried for me if I'd pasted first and only then realised that I'd lost everything. Take responsibility for your own computers or stop using them and buy one of those Fisher Price remote controlled radio-tracker remote execution vector iToys that all the kids are playing with these days. Matthew ps. I do have backups of course.
