What does it mean to use ports?

[George Hartzell]

Sijmen J. Mulder writes:
 > 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.

You can achieve something similar with poudriere, updating the ports
tree that it uses; rebuilding the rebuilding the things, then using
`pkg upgrade` to update the system.  I use portshaker to merge my
personal ports collection (ports that haven't been merged or that I
want to do differently from the standard) with the standard tree,
which is nice.

g.