Snow Leopard ate my ports

[Lenore Horner]

> Whenever you make a major OS or architecture change (PowerPC to  
> Intel, 32-bit to 64-bit, one OS version to another) you must  
> uninstall all ports and reinstall them. MacPorts will not detect  
> these changes, and will assume all ports currently installed were  
> installed with the current arch and OS version, which is obviously  
> not correct if you go and change them. So please uninstall and  
> reinstall all ports now.

Really naive question:  The goal seems to be to have MacPorts use no  
OS libraries, however we seem to live in an awkward in-between state  
where MacPorts uses enough OS libraries to break with (at least) major  
OS upgrades but still requires a lot of stuff to be duplicated.  Is it  
impossible for MacPorts to be entirely independent or is the  
restriction people time to fix/write stuff?  If it's theoretically  
impossible, it seems like trying to use as few as possible puts us in  
a worst of both worlds of having to reinstall MacPorts and having to  
take the time and disk space to duplicate many OS things.

(Compile time is an issue for me.  So is disk space since I need to  
keep my disk usage under 40GB so I have enough swap space.)

Lenore