removing distfiles?

RW rwmaillists at googlemail.com
Thu May 28 02:22:12 UTC 2009


On Wed, 27 May 2009 21:34:58 -0400
Robert Huff <roberthuff at rcn.com> wrote:

> 
> RW writes:
> 
> >  Personally I much prefer the less aggressive mode (distclean -D)
> >  which deletes files unreferenced by the ports tree, rather than
> >  unreferenced by installed ports.
> 
> 	I use "-DD".  With nearly 1000 ports on one machine, it's
> important to realize many ports go months (and some years) between
> updates and pain of downloading a fresh copy is minimal given a half
> decent net connection.

That's what I used to think until I  deleted some java distfiles, and
had to go though the rigmarole  of getting all the various files
manually. There's also the possibility that a distfile gets rerolled
and local copy is the only one that matches the port checksums. Disk
space is cheap, the extra files don't add up to much in practice. The
real advantage of cleaning comes from not have ten copies of kdebase
and the like.

Deleting only the obsolete files also has the advantage of being
entirely safe - so I do it from a periodic script.


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