portmaster issue: "The value of DISTDIR cannot be empty"

[Carl]

> I'm glad it worked out for you. Let me know if anything else weird happens.

Well I'm not the OP, but I just experienced something very similar. This 
arose when I was trying to deal with the combining of ports 
print/amspsfnt and print/cmpsfont into print/font-amsfonts. As you can 
see below, I had no problem upgrading print/amspsfnt, but the "DISTDIR 
cannot be empty" error prevented doing the same for print/cmpsfont. 
Although I admit to not showing some commands where I was hunting around 
in the man page and looking at the portmaster script, I'm not aware of 
doing anything significant other than what you see below, unless perhaps 
I switched between one 'screen' window to another (ie. different shell 
process). It doesn't make sense to me, but as you can see it worked 
after querying the value of DISTDIR.

################ start session ################

# portmaster --version
===>>> Version 3.9.1
# portsnap fetch update
                 [ ... ]
# portmaster -L | perl -ne '/^=/ ? $l = $_ : /^\t/ && (print($l, $_), $l 
= "")'
                 [ ... ]
===>>> amspsfnt-1.0_5
         ===>>> The print/amspsfnt port moved to print/font-amsfonts
         ===>>> Reason: Renamed
===>>> cmpsfont-1.0_7
         ===>>> The print/cmpsfont port moved to print/font-amsfonts
         ===>>> Reason: Renamed
                 [ ... ]
# lf -d /var/db/pkg/cmp* /var/db/pkg/ams*
/var/db/pkg/amspsfnt-1.0_5/     /var/db/pkg/cmpsfont-1.0_7/
# portmaster -o print/font-amsfonts print/amspsfnt
                 [ ... ]
===>>> Updating dependency entry for font-amsfonts-3.02 in each 
dependent port

===>>> No /usr/ports/print/amspsfnt exists to find the distfile list
        Try portmaster [-y] --clean-distfiles for a full cleanup

===>>> However, the list of files in /var/db/ports/amspsfnt/distfiles
        should be current.  Delete the files on this list? y/n [n] y

        Deleting /usr/ports/distfiles/amsps-unix.tar.gz
===>>> Installation of print/font-amsfonts (font-amsfonts-3.02) complete
# portmaster -o print/font-amsfonts print/cmpsfont

===>>> The value of DISTDIR cannot be empty
===>>> Aborting update

# /usr/bin/make BEFOREPORTMK=bpm -f/usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mk -V DISTDIR
/usr/ports/distfiles
# portmaster -o print/font-amsfonts print/cmpsfont
                 [ ... ]
===>>> Updating dependency entry for font-amsfonts-3.02 in each 
dependent port

===>>> No /usr/ports/print/cmpsfont exists to find the distfile list
        Try portmaster [-y] --clean-distfiles for a full cleanup

===>>> However, the list of files in /var/db/ports/cmpsfont/distfiles
        should be current.  Delete the files on this list? y/n [n]

        Deleting /usr/ports/distfiles/cmps-unix-19970930.tar.gz
===>>> Re-installation of font-amsfonts-3.02 complete

################ end session ################

Carl