I changed shiningsilence.com over from pkgsrc to dports over the last 48 hours or so.  Here’s how it went, in a series of bullet points:

• I had to download dports source and build the pkg tool by hand; since this system was upgraded from DragonFly 3.2 to DragonFly 3.4, pkg wasn’t automatically present as it would be for a new installation.
• I took the output of ‘pkg_info’ and culled it down to the applications I knew I used, and that formed my ‘to-install’ list for dports.  That worked in a very straightforward way.
• It took so long mostly because of two things: I was also dealing with an email problem at my workplace, which usually took precedence.  Also, I had several applications that I had previously installed by hand and needed to reconfigure to work as a dports item.
• Installing from binaries is really fast!  Really, the dports part of this was possibly the most brief.
• The only thing I needed to compile from source was php, in order to get the Apache plugin.  I’m sort of surprised the option isn’t on by default.
• Using ‘pkg search packagename’ is a good idea, because ‘pkg install’ can pick up multiple versions of a package.  e.g. ‘pkg install mysql-server’ selects mysql-server51, mysql-server55, and mysql-server56.  You probably don’t want to install all three.  Or even one, depending on your opinions.
• Overall, it went more easily than I had expected, given it only had half of my attention.