Information sought...

[Joseph Koshy]

> Do FreeBSD's tools allow me to swap in a new CUPS when it 
> becomes available without uprooting everything in its 
> dependency tree? 

Yes, this is portupgrade's default behaviour when building
from source.  I haven't used binary packages much.

You may also want to look at the binary updater too:

  http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/

-- 
FreeBSD Volunteer, http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy