The first step in this project is to write a program that transforms a port in its current layout, to a port where much of the same information is moved into a pkg-data file. This program will only be needed for the initial conversion of ports, and it's expected that only ports-developers will need to run it. Once the entire ports tree is officially converted, this program would be thrown away.

This program will support a few different options on how it cam be run. For initial statistics-gathering, the program will take an original ports-directory, and copy the entire thing to a new directory. It will keep track of various statistics while it is doing that, partially to give us some measures of how many ports were processed, what files were found, and what was done with them.

There will also be an option to transform an entire category of ports at once (but leave all other categories alone). There will also be an option to transform a specific list of ports, in-place.

If people decide the PkgData project is worth doing, then we will also want to add smarts to this transform program to do all the appropriate "cvs add"s and "cvs remove"s (but probably not the "cvs commit"s!).