Secondly, I don’t care that the ports are not branched, as long as packages are branched!

Packages can be:
(1) frozen in -RELEASE;
(2) -STABLE;
(3) -CURRENT.
The last one is out of question anyway, as long as you want to run a given point release, namely 6.2, not the bleeding buggy edge.

But tell me, how can one update to the latest *security/bug-fix release* of Firefox? Except for FreeBSD 6.2, where you *have to* upgrade the whole X.org from 6.9 to 7.2 in order to do that, *all* the other operating systems can do that during a point-release by just getting a newer (single) Firefox binary *package*, no extra updates required:
– Solaris (from blastwave),
– OpenBSD (newer packages get added into OpenBSD/4.1/packages),
– NetBSD (quarterly packages are available for some archs),
– Linux (obviously).

Doesn’t this makes the FreeBSD package model the worst of all?

Because, as long as a vulnerability-patched Firefox is not available from RELEASE packages (frozen), and the newer packages in STABLE require a major system upgrade, the only way to keep FreeBSD S_T_A_B_L_E is to only stick to -RELEASE and to compile from source… but what to compile from source when the ports are not branched?!?!

No surprise then: I eventually opted for a RHEL5 clone. Stable and with binary updates.