ports or packages?

[Rowdy]

Greetings,

I downloaded and successfully installed FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE a while 
back, it has been running flawlessly ever since.

Due to the speed of my Internet connection at home, it is trying for me 
to download the files required during the installation of ports, so I 
downloaded all the packages for 5.1 at work (where the Internet 
connection is not much better, but at least I can leave downloads 
running overnight and all weekend).

After more reading, I have concieved a desire to upgrade a couple of 
applications, including doing a cvsup, however that would appear to 
require the source and patches that the installation of ports would have 
provided.

Consequently I am wondering whether anyone else has wrestled with this, 
and whether it is actually a good idea to grab large groups of packages 
and keep a fairly static system (in the way of updates), or to have more 
patience and let the sources and patches download.

My reasoning for the latter is that unless there is a significant 
version increase, it would only be necessary to download (or to have 
cvsup download for me) much smaller incremental patches to ports rather 
than downloading an entire new package.  The only other downside is the 
compile time, but I did compile the J2SDK and I don't imagine there 
would be too many apps larger than that!

The optimisation of applications does not concern me too much, and I 
rarely if ever need any options that are not compiled into the packages.

So, has anyone else gone down this road, did you switch from packages to 
ports (with a 56K dialup Internet connection), how did you fare, and did 
you encounter any problems?

tia

Dave