port installation problems progress

[paul beard]

I had been having some problems installing ports: they manifested as 
configure misreading the system type and setting up libtool so it 
wouldn't build shared libs.

After some correspondence with a FreeBSD team member and a port 
maintainer, I decided to start afresh with a kernel and world 
reinstall. This led me to the solution. The email excerpted below 
mentioned almost the same error I was seeing:

http://www.atm.tut.fi/list-archive/freebsd-stable/msg04153.html

> For the last week or so, I've been having trouble building kernels 
> against a
> RELENG_4 source tree.  A 'make buildkernel' from /usr/src fails as 
> follows:
>
> perl5 /usr/src/sys/kern/vnode_if.pl -h /usr/src/sys/kern/vnode_if.src
> syntax error at /usr/src/sys/kern/vnode_if.pl line 135, near "{}"
> Execution of /usr/src/sys/kern/vnode_if.pl aborted due to compilation
> errors.

I took the advice suggested below.

http://www.atm.tut.fi/list-archive/freebsd-stable/msg04174.html

> I believe I have these resolved.
> If anybody's interested, it took a reboot, buildworld followed by an 
> install
> from /usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/perl, then buildkernel went fine.  At Mike
> Tansca's suggestion, I'd tried a buildworld (against a fresh source 
> tree),
> and I was getting cc errors - the reboot appears to have fixed those.  
> My
> build machine is now happily running a new kernel/world.
>

Some packages are building OK but I still see issues on some ports.

Any ideas how this might have gotten into this state and how I can 
resolve it completely?
--
Paul Beard
<www.paulbeard.org/>
paulbeard [at] mac.com