I have unintentionally deleted the contents of the packages database
after painfully constructing it over a period of time.  In itself
this is not a serious problem, but it makes it hard for me to
determine which packages to manipulate and, in this particular
instance, it seems to make it dangerous to try to build binary
packages as that would trigger a re-installation which may damage
modified configuration files.

I was hoping that a combination of

	export FORCE_PKG_REGISTER=yes
	export NO_INSTALL=yes

followed by a

	make install

in each installed package directory would do the trick, but that
didn't quite.  I imagine the actual process would not be difficult,
but I see no target to do it.  Any suggestions welcome.  I don't
mind some hacking, as long as it isn't hard to undo properly
afterwards.

++L