If you have a problem with cleaning out distfiles back stuff up.
I'm not a rocket scientist when it comes to ports, heck spent most of my time backtracking through makefiles to learn things I really wanted to know...
/usr/ports/distfiles seems to hold copies of downloaded source code from ports you have built/tried to build. /usr/ports/cat/port/distinfo gives checksums on those files.
You can get old copies of a ports Makefiles and distinfo's from CVS (what ever versions) by looking them up on
www.freebsd.org/ports, you can also redownload any thing that is still downloadable off the 'net.
A simple way to backup the distfiles:
Code:
tar -C /usr/ports -cf - distfiles | bzip2 > /tmp/distfiles.tar.gz
I selected bzip2 for the example because of the compression rate and out of box shipping with FreeBSD, use whatever you like.
Note: You could use tar's -j switch to tar and skip the | bzip2, I usually use the pipe because OpenBSDs tar lacks it and I some times like to choose other compressors then -z/|gzip and -j/|bzip2. Hence why I wrote it that way