gnome upgrade 2.20 to 2.22, circular dependencies

[Bob Frazier]

upgrading from gnome 2.20 to gnome 2.22 (using recent ports + FBSD 
7.1-PRERELEASE)

initially excluded firefox, thunderbird, openoffice, gstreamer-related 
ports, and followed directions in 'UPDATING' for the upgrade for gettext 
(i.e. in effect 'portupgrade -rR gettext').  Several ports failed to 
build.  On 2 different machines running the same OS and using the same 
ports tree, following a series of failed upgrades [due to varying 
reasons] the package database contained a number of circular 
dependencies which ultimately caused a series of hangs and/or crashes 
and serious problems cleaning up afterwards.

The problem appeared to be centered around dependencies for 
gnome-desktop, ligbnomeui, eel, and gvfs which ultimately began to point 
at one another (in particular, eel and libgnomeui had each other listed 
as dependencies).  Deleting these 4 ports (difficult after hangs + 
corruption) and then re-installing them later (using 
'FORCE_PKG_REGISTER') plus _HOURS_ of interactive pkgdb -F etc. seems to 
have alleviated the problem by correcting the circular dependencies.

the main symptoms are an extremely long period of time running 
pkg_create to create '+CONTENTS', which ultimately ends up in an 
infinite loop on a number of related ports (let's say 'eog' as an example).