outdated PEAR ports?

[rihad]

Hi, I need to install several packages from PEAR, among which are MDB2, 
LiveUser. The problem is that the named packages are a bit outdated:

PEAR port: 1.5.0_1 upstream: 1.5.2
MDB2 port: 2.3.0 upstream: 2.4.0
LiveUser port 0.15.1 upstream: 0.16.2

etc. etc. I could continue this list easily. Some of the packages (i.e. 
LiveUser) haven't had a maintainer for quite some time (as denoted by 
the orphaned ports at freebsd.org maintainer email). Since the ports folks 
don't seem to be keeping up the pace, can I simply install the PEAR's 
port (i.e. bootstrap) and then install all the necessary PEAR packages 
from within the PEAR installer? What undesirable effects could/will this 
have in practice? I understand one should use the ports subsystem 
wherever possible, but this is just not the case where this is possible ;-)

Thank you.