de/activate and Time Machine

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Tuesday April 26 2016 09:28:09 Brandon Allbery wrote:

>The registry's a bit of a risk, since it will be logically inconsistent if
>you aren't backing up the whole install. If I needed to worry about this,

Is that really a problem? IIRC I've already had restored files that had "mysteriously" gone missing by (force) deactivating the corresponding port and then activating it again. IOW, I don't have the impression that it is necessary that the registry be consistent with the contents under ${prefix}.
You *do* have to know what ports are active of course, but I presume that information is stored in the registry too.

OTOH it certainly wouldn't hurt to maintain a separate list. From what I have seen it is perfectly possible to take an image (tarball) from software/, put it in var/macports/incoming/verified, and then issue the corresponding install command. Evidently you probably don't want to do that for a whole install, unless there's a secret magic trick to force a port install without satisfying dependencies first (cf. dpkg -i vs. apt-get install).

>inactive dump and then running port activate over the active list. (Come to
>think of it. this means backing up /opt/local/etc separately so config

It's already being updated, no? The cheap approach would be to restore it a 2nd time, after doing the whole reinstall/re-activate dance.

>files don't possibly get overwritten. Yes, that would indicate Portfile
>bugs, but an emergency restore is the wrong time to discover and try to
>deal with those bugs.)

Amen to that!

Cheers,
René