a few questions about ports

[Murray Patterson]

Hi,  
  
I'm trying to get octave, scilab and emacs working for my machine.  I first  
got them from their respective sites and tried to compile and install them for  
my system, with no success.  Then I tried the ports for these: /usr/ports/
math/octave, /usr/ports/math/scilab, and /usr/ports/editors/emacs to see if 
that would work (not expecting any success), and these failed.  So I guess the  
first question is:  Why did the 5.2 iso's include those ports to begin with,  
when they don't work (I chose to get the ports collection from CD when I  
installed from CD)?  
  
So anyway, I then looked around the freebsd site for ports and came upon:  
  
ftp://ftp1.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-5.2-release/  
  
and sure enough the ports math/octave, math/scilab, editor/emacs don't exist.   
So I'm guessing that becuase this ftp site will always contain the most  
up-to-date ports for the amd64 architecture (am I right?), then I should just 
keep looking here to see if a port for any of these programs exists in the 
future.  If anyone can shed any light on any of these issues it would be 
great. 
 
Thanks, 
Murray