Any tricks for updating massive meta-ports like KDE?

[Darren Pilgrim]

I recently updated my ports tree, and of course XFree86 and KDE3 have been
updated.  The problem is the size of these ports and their meta nature. 
Updating XFree86 means updating a dozen or more XFree86-* ports, Xft, and a
handful of dependancies.  Updating KDE3 is easily twice that, and the build
time is huge.  I don't trust portupgrade to get this kind of update right.
Does anyone have any tricks for handling an update like this?