Reinstalling ports from a Port Archive

[Jeff Singleton]

OK ...

Seems my registry db got corrupt ... probably not due to anything
Macports did, rather than just a fluke of nature, considering
everything froze and force me to hard power my Macbook.  I wasn't
worried to much since I have been employing the port archive feature
to ensure that I have tarred up backups for my successfully built
ports.

I thought this feature was going to save me from having to rebuild
everything from scratch...but it seems that despite everything I have
read, MP is just not re-installing from archived ports as I would
expect.  Nothing has changed in my configuration, arch, platform, or
chosen Variants.  So why isn't MacPorts just extracting archived ports
from my packages folder?

Am I mis-understanding the port archive feature or am I missing some
command-line switch to force MP to install from archived port packages
instead of re-compiling from scratch?

-- 
Jeff