# stupid question about ports from disk



## johnblue (Feb 16, 2016)

I tried to google for this without much success .. 

Why is it that when ports are installed from disk that portsnap does not see it as a snapshot?  From my naive point of view it feels like it "should" be able to update itself from whatever point in time the ports were frozen.

*shrug*

Since we are talking about 70MB or so of transfer to tack on fetch, its really more of a technical question as to what is going on under the hood than anything else.

Thanks!


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## wblock@ (Feb 16, 2016)

You mean when the ports tree is copied to a new system?  portsnap(8) has a tracking database in /var/db/portsnap.  If that is not pre-populated, it has no way of knowing what is already present.


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## johnblue (Feb 16, 2016)

Yeah .. I guess that is where my thought process is headed.

If you were to do a fresh install and select ports as an option is there any way to index it so that the tracking database is populated?


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## wblock@ (Feb 16, 2016)

If the install media included the portsnap data, it could be copied into place.


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## johnblue (Feb 16, 2016)

wblock@ said:


> If the install media included the portsnap data, it could be copied into place.


rgr that and I suppose that is really the crux of the question.



If I need something during a fresh install without connecting to the internet (eg BASH), ports from the install media works.  But.  Once a network connection is going, you can never just sync up ports.  It is the full download/extract/update/enchilada.


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