Getting rid of port binaries in /software

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,

On Tue, May 17, 2016 at 06:38:24PM -0400, Nicolas Martin wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I suppose that if I were to manually delete those archives, MacPorts
> would not be so kind as to detect this and just start the build
> process over again, if he needs to?

I thought about this earlier but then ended up forgetting to mention it
in my initial reply: Deleting these archive files may trick an old
script that was used to do the transition towards the archive-based
approach into thinking that you're doing a migration from an old
macports version when you run selfupdate. If that's the case, it will
try to re-create the archives you deleted from the files you have on
disk, which will fail.

Since a couple of people ran into this before without asking on the list
on possible side-effects, I think we should actually remove this upgrade
code path soonish. It's been years since MacPorts 1.8 (?) that
introduced this change, and it's unlikely that anybody still has a
working 1.8 installation they want to upgrade.

-- 
Clemens