Ports woes.

[cuddlesomebunny]

Could anybody explain to me what is up with ports? 

I am using FreeBSD 5.x-p2 and I am using ports and am having one hell of a time installing things. 

Here's what is happeng. 

I go to install ports and if it needs to get a dependency it goes and fetches it and becomes the usual compile process. Except that the dependency might already be installed with the exact version required and so most of the time the ports error out telling me I need to make deinstall on some dependency then make reinstall on it. 

And don't even get me started on installing Apache. I tried installing mod_php4 but before hand installed apache+ssl and so then mod_php4 doesn't even see that apache is already installed and then fetches the version it wants thus blowing out the apache+ssl and I have to then reinstall that package to get ssl and apache. 

If I do things with /stand/sysinstall it errors out on a dependency if it is already installed instead of ignoring the fact that it is already there and errors out. This particular behavour started around 4.8 or so. Maybe earlier but I don't seem to recall exactly when this started to happen. 

I tried using the portupgrade stuffs but that just seems to make things worse overall. 

Anybody got any hints as to why it seems ports is having these sorts of problems?