Typically one "ports" software so that it can be compiled into a "package", so a port always comes first.. what the BSD communities call the "ports tree" is simply an infrastructure to built software into packages and to deal with dependencies, the ideas are similar but the implementations differ.
Carpetsmoker is entirely right though, in that context, it shows preference.. user customization of ports is discouraged in the OpenBSD community (..setting custom compile flags, enable options, etc), and they prefer that people use the packages they provide to reduce the support load associated with building software from source manually.
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