Thanks, I've read about both these facilities, and in fact I have them installed. However, none of the documentation I've found makes what they really do understandable, and especially not how to recover if there's a problem during upgrading... which I've had in the past.
I only *minimally* use ports, specifically because of problems upgrading. I only use ports for minor things. That said, I don' fear upgrading "/usr/ports", I just do any actual port upgrades cautiously.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html
gives many ways to update your /usr/ports .
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