[BUGS] Package management

[home at oranges.id.au]

Hi everyone, just subscribed, first post. Some of you guys were very
helpful on IRC the other day, but I'm more of a mailing list kinda guy
so here I am (: That said, let me know if you'd rather I ask on IRC
and I'll go back there.

I need to maintain a collection of FreeBSD machines, and am exploring
the ways to do so. While I have zero experience with BSD (before a
coupla months ago), I have a moderate amount of experience looking
after GNU/Linux boxes (and a small amount using Gentoo's portage). So
I'm not flying blind, but some pointers from you guys would be lovely,
if you're willing. Of particular interest to me right now is package
management.

Some of the machines have some sort of audit (apparently run by
'periodic daily') running which emails me when packages have security
issues - this is handy, because I can then login to the machine,
perform 'portsnap fetch update' as required, then either 'make install
clean' for the individual package or 'portupgrade package'. How's this
sounding so far?
One question I have: Maintaining the ports tree. The machines are
grouped in separate physical locations. Should I do the following?
* take one machine per location
* schedule a portnsnap cron on it
* push the resulting /usr/ports tree out to all other machines at that
location (rsync --delete ?)

It is best to have the ports tree mostly up to date, right? A lot of
these machines run FreeBSD 6.x, so I'm wondering if a ports tree newer
than some date will result in dependency problems.

Other tips gratefully received.

Peace,
Greg.

-- 
Gregory Orange