The ports collection has some serious issues

[scratch65535 at att.net]

I have to admit that I avoid ports if at all possible because
I've hardly ever been able to do a build that ran to completion. 
There's always some piece of code that's missing and can't be
found, or is the wrong version, et lengthy cetera.   I've never
done release engineering, but I honestly can't imagine how some
of the stuff that makes its way into the ports tree ever got past
QA.  It would get someone sacked if it happened in industry.

If the dev schedule would SLOW DOWN and the commitment switched
to quality from the current emphasis on frequency, with separate
trees for alpha-, beta-, and real release-quality, fully-vetted
code, the ports system might become usable again.