portsnap

[balanga]

Am I correct in thinking that portsnap fetch copies a current snapshot of the ports directory tree to /usr/ports and this would be the same irrespective of the platform it was being run on? I ran this under armv5 and it was painfully slow and wondered if the resulting directory tree would be identical to that created on a PC... In which case I could achieve the same by running it on my PC then copying the directory tree to the USB stick I use to boot FreeBSD/ARM?

Also is it possible to do a portsnap fetch of an old snapshot from a particular date?

 

[SirDice]

There is only one ports tree.

 

[hukadan]

Am I correct in thinking that portsnap fetch copies a current snapshot of the ports directory tree to /usr/ports and this would be the same irrespective of the platform it was being run on?

This is correct. Architectures are handled using ARCH variables in each port Makefile.

Also is it possible to do a portsnap fetch of an old snapshot from a particular date?

No, it is not possible. If you need more flexibility, I would recommend using svnlite(1) which is the version of svn(1) included in the base system. You can fetch past versions of the ports tree, but also download only the part of the ports tree you need (I would recommend downloading part of the ports tree only if you need few ports with few dependencies though).
See https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/svn.html for more details.