This is probably related to #10827 where upgrade repeats infinitely.
I have about 30 ports installed an attempted to force update to get rid of old libraries; I aborted the attempt after running for 50 hours.
When examining the /opt/local/var directory to determine why it was taking so long I noticed a lot of extra disk space was consumed by the distfiles and packages sub directories.
For example:
distfiles/gettext had a copy of the .tar.bz2 plus another gettext subdirectory.
This 2nd gettext directory only had a gettext subdirectory.
The 3rd level had the .tar.bz2 and a gettext subdirectory.
This alternating pattern was repeated:
* The 4th, 6th, ... were like the second - just subdirectory.
* The 5th, 7th, ... included a copy of the .tar.bz2 files.
In total an extra 9 copies of gettext files; libiconv was similar. Many others had the same problem but usually only 3 to 5 extra copies.
A similar situation existed in the packages directory
where darwin/powerpc was nested many times with copies of the
compiled packages at each powerpc subdirectory.
removing all the duplicates recovered about 300MB of disk space.
