What does it mean to use ports?

[Sijmen J. Mulder]

hw <hw at adminart.net> wrote:
> > 	Verbum sapienti: be careful when you do this.  The settings in
> > make.conf are used for _every_ compilation on the system - ports
> > ... and world ... and the kernel,
> 
> Thanks for the warning --- Gentoo has something like that, too.

Note that, having adjusted USE on Gentoo, 'emerge --newuse @world' will
cause the whole tree's dependency graph to be updated and all affected
packages recompiled. I don't think any of the BSD port systems have
this feature.

Sijmen