I've finished removing old-style dependencies from the ports tree. I will do a second pass for a few foo->=version which I didn't do the first time.
So, old-style depends are completely dead, the ports tree will soon error out if it sees them. Likewise, old-style library-specs, like xml2.>=9 are completely dead, you should write xml2>=9. Support for that will vanish soon. I did also update documentation that I'm aware of, point me at other documentation if you meet old-style stuff. I'm toying with a new feature that will simplify packages dependencies for stuff like autoconf of db/v4. ;-)
