Upgrading packages - portupgrade confusion

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2010, Kaya Saman wrote:

> The thing I don't quite understand though is that if the ports tree gets 
> refreshed, do the packages get upgraded or will I need to rebuild them??

The ports tree is just build instructions, so updating it doesn't update 
any installed applications.  It does let you use a program to see which 
installed applications need to be updated, like pkg_version or 
portversion.

Here's a document I've been working on lately about upgrading ports. 
I'm not sure it's really there yet, but it covers the basics:
   http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/portupgrade.html