FreeBSD ports management articles
I found these useful over the last twelve months or so. All well worth reading, not more than about half an hour’s worth of reading there to increase your comfort with ports by an order of magnitude:
http://www2.papamike.ca:8082/tutorials/pub/fbsd-ports2.html#pruning
http://www.math.colostate.edu/~reinholz/freebsd/pkgdb_F.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-chat/2006-January/003661.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2007-October/160881.html
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An honorary OpenBSD mention, on how (not) to use a mailing list:
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119350344427347&w=2