howto follow stable on openbsd 3.6?

ok, i must admit that i am starting to get a little overwhelmed by all the information about keeping openbsd 3.6 up to date and secure. i have decided to not follow -current. i am a new user and don't think that would be appropriate. instead i have decided to follow the -stable branch. i have downloaded cd36.iso and used it to install openbsd 3.6. that means i am currently running -release, correct? so please tell me if any of my following assumptions are incorrect: basically, i have two choices 1.) individually patch after downloading the source files or 2.) use anoncvs to download -stable sources. Now if i were to use method (1), what ports version should i use? for method (2)? i have been almost succesful using both methods. anoncvs seems like the way to go. i most recently tried anoncvs. i checked out the sources (is that the same as 'get'ing them?) but when i went to update, the process seemed to stop (not returning to a prompt) with a undescriptive error about sendmail. could someone please point me in the right direction so i can get on with using ports and having a bit more fun with my new system please? i appreciate it.

The stable branch is the release + all the patches from the errata page + sometimes they fix some obvious minor errors which don't always show up on the errata page (say, a typo or two in the man pages). Hence, the stable (also called patch) branch is sometimes a little more ahead of applying patches manually, but not by much.
1. If you're following the stable (i.e. patch) branch for sources, you should follow the same branch for ports. So, for 3.6 you would use:

Then, to keep it updated:


2. I usually prefer cvsup instead of cvs only because it downloads changes for me a lot faster than cvs does. If you do decide to go ahead with cvsup, here's one piece of advice:
Install cvsup using pkg_add instead of ports. This is because the cvsup source is written in modula3, which requires the port to download and compile the modula3 compiler first, before it will compile cvsup. This could take around 30-45 minutes, whereas a pkg_add takes only a couple of minutes or so.