Apparently, though unproven, at 19:02 on Sunday 19 September 2010, Mark Knecht did opine thusly:
> In a related way I've never stopped to look at /usr in the process of > doing an install. I have an old Mac Mini that I've been trying to get > Gentoo running on recently so in the middle of my install this morning > I stopped after untarring the stage-3 tarball and before untarring the > portage snapshot and found that /usr/portage doesn't exist at that > point. > > Does this suggest that I'm actually free at any time to rm -r > /usr/portage and just untar the current snapshot? Other than distfiles > and the overhead of downloading all that stuff again is there anything > in /usr/portage that once erased would damage the machine? No, nothing. All the valuable data files are elsewhere in /var and all of portage can be downloaded at any time. $PORTDIR/local/layman can also be downloaded at any time. Your personal overlay (if you have one) in $PORTDIR/local/$WHATEVER will of course get nuked so you should back that up. It will be re-read when you put it back and run eix-update -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
