Has the port collection become to large to handle.

[fbsd]

Keep the ports tree how it is, as others have said the size is small
on modern hard drives and bandwidth trivial, once the initial ports
tree is in place keeping it up to date needs very little bandwidth
and
its only distfiles that tend to be large, but you only download
distfiles for ports you install so this is a very good system.  If
at
least one person uses a port it is justified and I very much like
that
most tiny apps I search for in the ports tree do indeed exist.  How
would you define commonly used ports? we would end up with a
favouritism system in place and many arguments about which ports
would
be included in the commonly used group, you also forget that many
ports that may look meaningless from where you sit are necessary as
dependants to other ports.

Is php4 out of date? no its still been maintained and is more
suitable
for many people, likewise with mysql 4.1.  Openssl 0.9.7 all are
older
branches but not out of date.  The ports system is very clever in
how
it is so adaptive eg. Ruby needs openssl and if you have 0.9.7 it
sets
that as the dependency rather then 0.9.8.  No hacking of makefiles
needed.

Chris

************** The point being made by the OP is the packages are
not
being kept up to date and the usage of packages & ports don't work
together
because of the overall size of the collection.
How does what you posted address the packages? *******