Thanks for the comments. I've been re-reading faq 15 and related stuff, and realized that I thought I had figured this out before. My memory is not improving with age.
This is how I re-understand it now: pkg_add -u is for getting packages with issues that are severe enough to motivate one of the developers to put a package together for. For less severe issues, we have to take the time and effort to rebuild the packages ourselves, according to our own priorities, setups, etc. Does that sound right? I had thought my ports tree was messed up, and it probably was, but something in the hardware seems to be breaking. Even with the ports tree on the other drive, rebuilding firefox results in a hardware reset with nothing in the logs to indicate why. Probably should grab something to monitor the temperatures, etc., while I try building the compiler again. Maybe use job control to suspend the build process every five minutes or so and let things cool down. (Since I can't afford a new motherboard right now.) Joel Rees Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens. All is a stream of text flowing from the past into the future.
