On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 10:58:56AM -0400, Nicolas Martin wrote: > I have looked for real answers regarding this question through the > mailing list, but did not really understand the purpose of these > files.
MacPorts always keeps a tarball of the files installed by a certain port in this directory. This allows you to switch between installed versions or between ports that would otherwise conflict without re-installing them completely. port activate/port deactivate implement this. The rationale here is that after an update you can test the updated version of a software for a while, and if you notice it causes problems you can file a ticket and easily go back to the old version with a simple sudo port activate @oldversion MacPorts used to keep these files in a directory and just hard-link them into $prefix, but that (a) means modifications to files in $prefix affect the supposed-to-be prinstine copy, and (b) isn't easy to download as pre-built binary. For this reason, we switched to tarballs a while back and now provide pre-built binaries for some of these tarballs. > I have almost 5Gb of archives (tbz2) in > /opt/local/var/macports/software. You seem to have quite a few ports installed. My software directory is 3.4G with 652 installed ports. > I have already run the port uninstall inactive command, so from my > understanding, what remains in this path is from currently active and > used ports. Correct. > What I don’t understand, and does not seem to be clear from any posts > I have read regarding the matter, is why should these archives be > kept? If you delete those archives you can no longer deactivate and re-activate a port. In addition to the use case above, this is also helpful when one of the files installed by the port was corrupted for some reason -- just de- and re-activate it. -- Clemens _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list macports-users@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
