problem with reactivating ports

[Richard L. Hamilton]

> On Jan 14, 2019, at 08:34, Bill Cole <macportsusers-20171215 at billmail.scconsult.com> wrote:
> 
> On 14 Jan 2019, at 2:46, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
>> Hello Ryan!
>> 
>> 
>>> Do you need those old inactive versions?  If not, you could
>>> uninstall the inactive ports before beginning the exercise.
>> 
>> Is there a safe command to uninstall all inactive ports in one rush?
> 
> This is one of the 3 housekeeping tasks that 'port reclaim' performs (with prompting for each step.) or you can just do "port uninstall installed and not active" for just cleaning out inactive ports.

"not active" - "inactive" works too.  And "active" or "inactive" seems to imply "installed" anyway.

I'd say "port uninstall inactive and not requested"  most of the time (safer), and just "port install inactive" once in awhile, esp. when there was nothing that was failing to update, and no other reason I anticipated wanting to fall back to an older version of a requested port.
sh-3.2# port echo inactive and requested|wc -l
      11
sh-3.2# port echo requested|wc -l
     330
sh-3.2# port echo inactive|wc -l
      51
sh-3.2# port echo inactive and not requested|wc -l
      40

I gather that the last of those is older versions of dependencies of requested ports.  And that it's been awhile since I cleaned out old stuff. :-)