How to figure out the revision of FreeBSD ports?

Question

FreeBSD ports are upgradable (with portsnap fetch), ergo they must have some kind of revision which refers to the status of the complete ports collection. Which is easiest way to figure this revision (during portsnap fetch a file name is displayed which seems to be a hashsum, but that happens only on updates). The instructions on how to use ports don't mention anything

Answer 1

The complete ports collection only differs between releases. The ports have their individual version, not related to the whole tree.

Try

pkg_version -v

or if you use pkgng,

pkg version -v

To get a list of installed ports, their versions, and the latest version.

Answer 2

Until relatively recently, the Ports collection was managed using CVS. CVS doesn’t store revisions of the whole repository but rather per file.

Nowadays, the Ports collection is managed using SVN. The repository is publicly available. However, because end-users don’t need to access SVN features like commit messages or file history, the portsnap utility is used.

Portsnap uses a file at /usr/ports/.portsnap.INDEX that contains hashes of all ports within the tree. Using this file and its server-side version, changes can be detected and only the required patches are downloaded.

The timestamp of your current snapshot is stored in /var/db/portsnap/tag in the second field. Using this date, you can try and match a revision in the Subversion repository, but that’s as close as it gets.