How to perform a conservative package upgrade with pkgsrc?

[Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-usenet2012%yahoo.com@localhost>]

Imagine this scenario: I have package v 1.2 installed from the latest
stable repos. A new version 1.4 is available in current with more
functionalities. Package 1.4 comes with a baggage of various version
bumps, therefore it requests that many dependencies be removed and
upgraded.

My goal is to create the least possible builds of needed dependencies
and then manually install them with either pkgin or pkg_add.

Am I correct in thinking that a bumped package from a newer branch
might still, in some cases, work with older dependencies? (I hope I am
not talking tripes. I am still a newbie so please be gentle.)

One obvious solution could be to 'make package' in each directory and
see if that works, but it's potentially time consuming.

'make build' will instead stop all the times it finds an existing
dependency that has been bumped.

'make update' and 'make replace' will replace and install the
offending dependencies but this is not what I want.

Any ideas? I don't really want to go too far and make bulk builds in a chroot.

-- 
Ottavio