Are there negative side-effects to moving this largish subdirectory to an external drive and connecting via soft link?
I haven't tried it myself in a while, but as far as I know having it on another volume should work fine. You don't need the link, since this location is configurable as 'portdbpath' in macports.conf. The negative effects are really just the usual effects of using an external drive. Builds and registry operations will be limited by the drive's speed, and there will be an additional performance penalty when activating ports because the files are extracted in the software directory and then moved into place, and that move will be across volumes with this configuration.
- Josh
