/usr/ports/distfiles maintenance

[Matt Mills]

Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
> On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 12:28:54PM +0100 I heard the voice of
> Matt Mills, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
>>Something which has recently struck me as an unanswered question.
>>How do you all maintain your /usr/ports/distfiles directory?
> 
> I'm a simple guy, myself; I don't see a big need for various automated
> (and EXPENSIVE!  What're you people THINKING poking around 12,000-some
> distinfo files?!) solutions.  When /usr/ports starts getting full
> (approx. "every so often"), I poke around and delete some of the older
> and bigger distfiles.  When we pass versions of really big stuff (like
> X, or TeX, Mozilla, etc.) I delete the old ones.  You've got du,
> you've got `ls -l | sort -n +4`...  there's lots of low-hanging fruit
> without getting complex, especially since I'll bet you've got more
> space for ports than I do.

This is almost exactly what I did before I asked the above question. 
Usually I would "ls -l | sort +5n", then delete old large sources 
(firefox, perl, Xorg etc.). Of course, portsclean is a far simpler and 
more thorough method.

> And, of course, every once in a while I get bored and newfs /usr/ports
> entirely and re-co everything.  Just for sport.

I've never resorted to that, and certainly shouldn't need to thanks to 
portsclean. :) If I notice that free space on /usr has taken a hit, a 
simple "portsclean -C" normally finds a large work directory that I 
forgot about.

Thanks for your insights, it is good to know that I wasn't the only 
person doing things manually!

-- 
Matt