Rebuilding my ports area

[Warren Block]

On Fri, 24 Jul 2015, David Wolfskill wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 05:21:07PM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE-p20 (GENERIC) #0: Tue Jul 21 19:29:33 UTC 2015
>>
>> Having completely scragged my ports area following various changes to
>> pkg/pkgng/etc, and being unable to "sysinstall" it from CD (not found for
>> some reason) or via FTP (not found on server etc), I found a pristine copy
>> of ports.txz and unpacked it (sigh, yet another compression scheme), after
>> renaming the old directory.
>>
>> Anyway, what do I do now?  Assume that many ports have been installed, and
>> that the databases etc are probably a dog's breakfast, per the conflicts
>> that I have posted here earlier.  If it helps, I have a list of those
>> ports that were installed, and hopefully the dependencies will be taken
>> care of automagically.
>> ....
>
> Near the bottom of portmaster(8), there is a procedure entitled "Using
> portmaster to do a complete reinstallation of all your ports".  I have
> used that procedure (with some variations) over the years -- e.g.,
> migrating from 8.x -> 9.x, then 9.x to  10.x; more recently, I extracted
> bits of it to migrate from stable/10 i386 -> stable/10 amd64 [gory
> details at
> <http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/FreeBSD/convert_i386_amd64.html>].

Updated portmaster man page procedure here:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/rebuilding-all-ports-with-portmaster.51210/