Using portsnap after sysinstall

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 12:29:54PM -0400, alex at schnarff.com wrote:
> I'm a longtime OpenBSD user admin'ing my first FreeBSD box. During 
> installation of the system (6.2-RELEASE), I saw the option to add the 
> ports tree and did so, figuring it made sense to add at that point 
> since I'd definitely be using it later. Unfortunatley, I've just now 
> discovered -- after installing several ports from my sysinstall'd tree 
> -- that this installed an old version of the ports free, from when this 
> version of FreeBSD was released. This is a problem because I need newer 
> versions of some of the ports than is currently available, and I'm not 
> sure how to proceed.

I really wish sysinstall would install a copy of ports created by
portsnap and provide an option to install the associated working files.
As things stand, I never install the ports collection from sysinstall
because it takes forever and I just end up deleting it.

> What I'd really like to be able to do is used portsnap, which seems 
> like a great tool, but preserve all of the information about my 
> existing packages. I have no idea if I can just wipe out my old 
> /usr/ports and run "portsnap extract" (I've already run "portsnap 
> fetch"), or if doing so would break my ports DB, dependencies, or 
> something else I'm not familiar with.

You can delete /usr/ports at any time without touching any installed
packages.  You may want to save /usr/ports/distfiles and if it exists
/usr/ports/packages before removing /usr/ports.

-- Brooks
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