Actually, they had been generating ~weekly snapshots of built binary packages in the past, but for some reason I don't understand, they weren't used by default, and the setup to actually use them was... obscure and not really officially documented. You had to set the right environment variable to point to the remote HTTP repository.
The new pkg uses the up-to-date repository by default. It has fixed all this mess, and turned binary packages from something very clunky that nobody really used to something fairly solid that can be used in production. The only reason I use ports nowadays is when I need to set custom build options on a package.
The new pkg uses the up-to-date repository by default. It has fixed all this mess, and turned binary packages from something very clunky that nobody really used to something fairly solid that can be used in production. The only reason I use ports nowadays is when I need to set custom build options on a package.