portmaster, portupgrade, etc

[Mark Linimon]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2017 at 04:39:25PM -0400, Ernie Luzar wrote:
> even the native ports system usage on personal machines
> wwill fade away.

I have seen this claim many times by users but AFAIR that
was never a goal.  The feeling was that _most_ users would
migrate to using packages, once using packages had been made
much easier and more robust than the previous packaging
technology.  (Disclaimer: I was much more familiar with the
internals of the old pkg-* tools and the bad state that they
had gotten into.)

> The past 2 years a great
> amount of effort has gone into bring the handbook up to
> date with the current status of the operating system. But
> it is a very far cry from a teaching aid.

I have some proposed patches for the ports section that
need to be dusted off and committed.  But I think your
critism is valid -- it works as a reference better than as
a tutorial.  The latter is not fixable in the near-term
(simply due to volunteer cycles).

mcl