Not helpful and quite condescending.
If that's condescending, then what is "RTFM" ?
I figure most of us here are largely the same sort of people who prefer quick & snappy answers because we are all in a rush to nowhere. But more importantly, you were successful; this is why The Handbook for FreeBSD is the de facto "All-The-Things". I'm occasionally irritated by the inevitable 3:07AM "Oh god I gotta read through all that just to find out one tiny procedure, at this hour?!", even though it always turns out to be a rather short excursion...world-class levels of literature skimming...and all of 5 minutes to gather the answer out of El Handibookus Daemonus.
The binary vs source update choice I suppose is a matter of preference vs need. Binary probably works best for most.
As to your ports upgrading adventure: I've dabbled with ccache, which cuts a fair chunk of time out of the whole procedure; particularly when buildworld'ing.
You may wish to have a go at
portmaster -ady --no-confirm
, I use it 99% of the time and suits my purposes well enough (I leave my FreeBSD servers largely alone and stick to
pkg
, but for my personal desktops/laptops I need more specific tweaks). I've had my fair share of
make install clean
issues regarding dependency-build-incompatible-breaks, that I've moved mostly away from tradition. I'd come across issues with using
portupgrade
previously as well, where
portmaster
on the other hand worked without a problem.
When it comes to building massive ports like
rust,
firefox or
iridium for instance, I offload that to a crazy fast Xeon/SkyLake-X box and simply fetch the package it built later on. Not ideal, but suits my needs just fine.
We are all going to end up being the stubborn, set in our ways, insistent on build-everything out of habit, elderly computer nerds at the retirement home, aren't we?