back when  portupgrade  was common, I wrote a small version of a script that did some of  portmaster functionality, and had to be placed in the port subdir before usage. It tracked how long the port took to build, and other data. Still can be used now, but  pkg  saves a lot of time, despite my pre-pkg wish for a parallel [ non- sqlite3] way to track, deinstall, install packages [ aka 2007 ish added back in ] to add resiliency to mission-critical installs, particularly since it might help  portupgrade, portmaster attain their full prior usability.