A possibly odd upgrade question

[Chris Brennan]

On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 2:26 PM, Jerry <jerry at seibercom.net> wrote:

Chris, when I have had to do major rebuilds, I have found
> "portmanager" to be the best tool. It just seems to work. In any case,
> if it were me, I would clean out the /usr/ports/distfiles directory,
> update your ports tree, and then update you OS. When you are finished
> with that fun chore, run; "portmanager -u -l -y -f". Depending on the
> number of ports installed, it might take some time though. Obviously,
> you need portmanager installed first. By the way, if you know you need
> a distfile installed first, something like diablo-jdk or diablo-jre
> that require you to have the distfile all ready in
> the /usr/ports/distfiles directory prior to attempting to build the
> port, then do that prior to updating your system and running
> portmanager.
>

The problem here (as I have previously mentioned and further discussed in my
reply to Andrew Clarke) is that the most of the ports won't rebuild for
various reasons. I'm pretty handy, but not brilliant. So instead of asking
for my hand to be held by the mailing list, I thought nuking everything I
installed from ports after moving to 8.x would be the smartest move, then
from there reinstall (from a fresh ports tree) only what I need for the
retasked purpose.