de/activate and Time Machine

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Wednesday April 27 2016 23:10:20 Brandon Allbery wrote:

>I was apparently headed into a brainfog when I wrote that.. recovered today

Heh, why do I seem to relate ... :)

>backup, found that there were port components not under /opt/local missing
>(notably the symlinks into launchd's directories), and a
>deactivate/reactivate fixed.

That also sounds familiar in the sense of been there, done that.

Good, so it should indeed be possible to come up with a script or the like that sets up Time Machine to do only an "economic" kind of backing up of ${prefix}. Supposing that all ports that do use site-specific configuration files store those files under etc/ .
I'll try to find a moment to figure out to what extent keeping an additional list of which ports are active is required.

I just think of a complication though. The port command is installed in bin/ together with a few others, and there are probably libraries "base" uses that live in lib/ . It's probably possible to add those to Time Machine's filter list but it does make the idea a bit less appealing.

R.