poudriere distfiles - explain the process

[Anton Shterenlikht]

I've run poudriere distclean -n.
It took about an hour.
All the time /usr/ports/distfiles was empty,
which was confirmed at the end:

*skip*

OME}})
make: Fatal errors encountered -- cannot continue
clang: not found
make: "/pdr/ports/lang/v8/Makefile" line 24: warning: Couldn't read shell's output for "clang --version | /usr/bin/head -1 | /usr/bin/sed -e 's/.*clang version \([0-9]\)\.\([0-9]\).*/\1\2/'"
make: "/pdr/ports/mail/p5-Sendmail-Milter/Makefile" line 22: warning: Couldn't read shell's output for "/usr/local/bin/perl5.16.3 -V:usethreads | /usr/bin/awk '/define/ { print "define"; exit }'"

====>> Gathering list of actual distfiles
====>> No stale distfiles to cleanup
# 

So what was it doing all this time?
I think I probably misunderstand
the purpose of "poudriere distclean".
It's not just checking all exising
files under /usr/ports/distfiles
to see which are outdated, is it?
It's traversing the whole of the
ports tree, right? Why?

Thanks

Anton