Upgrade strategy for production server

[Travis Whitton]

Hello all,
After working with Linux on a number of levels for the last 5 years, I've
decided to try FreeBSD. I just finished installing 4.9, and I have everything   
tweaked to fit my needs.  I'm tracking RELENG_4_9, and so far so good with
everything.

Now on to my question, I just noticed that 5.3 will probably be coming out
sometime in the near future, which makes me wonder if I've made the wrong
decision in installing 4.9.  Honestly, there aren't really any features in 5.3
that I think I'll really need, but I'm concerned about the lifespan of the 4.x
branch. How long will it be until ports start failing due to using an older
branch? How long can I feasibly run on the 4.x branch?

I wouldn't be so concerned; however, once this server is in place, it will be
running some very critical services and the thought of backing everything up
and installing from scratch to migrate to 5.x just represents too much
unnecessary downtime. It seems that there isn't any clean way to upgrade
between major versions due to differing filesystems (UFS and UFS2) and leftover
relics from previous releases causing potential problems. What do most people
do for their longterm upgrade strategy with FreeBSD on production servers?
Sorry for the long-winded question, but I want to get this right the first time,
so I don't end up kicking myself down the road. I'd also prefer not to have
to do a full reinstall once a year or whenever a new major release happens
just to get support.

One last thing, I recently patched a port, dbf2mysql, in order to get it to
work properly with mysql323-server. What is the proper way to get this patch
committed to the ports tree? It seems generally useful to anyone using the
program, and I would rather not have to manually patch everytime I upgrade
the port.

Thanks,
Travis Whitton