Portsnap

[Colin Percival]

Gerard Seibert wrote:
> I just started using 'portsnap' on my FreeBSD 5.4 PC. If I were to run
> cvsup again, and perhaps 'portsdb -Uu' would that cause a problem if
> 'portsnap' were run again? Would I have to run the extract command
> again to initialize the ports tree?

If you run CVSup, you'll make some changes to the tree -- updating some
ports, and probably adding and removing others.  When you next run
portsnap, it will look at its index of what is "supposed" to be in the
existing ports tree, and re-extract all the ports which it thinks have
been modified.

In the end, portsnap will have done more work than necessary, and in
the unlikely scenario that a port was added and then removed between
the two runs of portsnap you'll end up with an "orphaned" port directory
left behind; but nothing catastrophic will have happened.

Running `portsdb -Uu` will have no ill effects at all: Portsnap will
overwrite the INDEX files with new versions it builds, while portsnap
will (as usual) ignore the INDEX.db file entirely.

Colin Percival