Questions about port revision numbers, portsnap, csup

[RW]

On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:04:05 +0100
Matthew Seaman <m.seaman at infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:


> You could change to using csup rather than portsnap, but be aware that
> this pretty much means scrubbing all of your portsnap state.  Indeed,
> for best results with csup, starting with an empty /usr/ports might be
> an idea -- I don't think that will be necessary, but I can't be
> certain. If you switch to csup, switching back to portsnap will
> definitely require you to re-download the ports tree and replace
> everything you had installed via csup.


As I understand it portsnap's state is split between /var and the ports
directory itself. The former contains the snapshot and its metadata, and
the latter contains the metadata for that specific copy of the tree.
Using csup shouldn't affect the stuff under /var, but it invalidates
the metadata in the ports directory.

If you return to portsnap after using csup you should only need to do a
new "extract" which overwrite the individual files and each
"origin-directory", and generates the local portsnap metadata. If you
are paranoid (or want to clean-up extra cruft) delete the ports
directory first.

Going the other way the tree should really be deleted and redownloaded
to ensure that csup keeps track of all the patch files. That's more of
a long-term issue though.