What is "popt" and why is it giving me grief in "ports"?

[John]

I'm trying to install acroread and jdk14 on my system, and I keep running
into problems.

I first tried it with ports up-to-date as of about a week ago, and
then I stopped with a dependency of devel/popt on gettext0.13, and
gettext0.12 was the latest and greatest in the ports tree.

I ran cvsup Saturday, hoping that I just grabbed stuff in the middle
of a non-atomic commit or something, and tried again.  Now it is
is complaining that /usr/local/bin/libtool15 isn't present.

Is this something I should report to someone?  Is this just another
transient error?  How can I move forward to build acroread and jdk
for my 5.3-STABLE system?

Here is the "make" "backtrace":

Returning to build of rpm-3.0.6_9
===>   rpm-3.0.6_9 depends on file: /usr/local/bin/autoconf213 - not found
===>    Verifying install for /usr/local/bin/autoconf213 in /usr/ports/devel/autoconf213
===>   Returning to build of rpm-3.0.6_9
===>   rpm-3.0.6_9 depends on file: /usr/local/bin/libtool13 - found
===>   rpm-3.0.6_9 depends on shared library: popt.0 - not found
===>    Verifying install for popt.0 in /usr/ports/devel/popt
===>  Building for popt-1.7
make  all-recursive
Making all in po
source='popt.c' object='popt.lo' libtool=yes  depfile='.deps/popt.Plo' tmpdepfile='.deps/popt.TPlo'  depmode=gcc3 /bin/sh ./depcomp  /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/libtool15 --mode=compile cc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.  -I. -I.  -I/usr/local/include  -O -pipe -c -o popt.lo `test -f 'popt.c' || echo './'`popt.c
/usr/local/bin/libtool15: Can't open /usr/local/bin/libtool15: No such file or directory
*** Error code 2

Stop in /usr/ports/devel/popt/work/popt-1.7.
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/ports/devel/popt/work/popt-1.7.
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/ports/devel/popt/work/popt-1.7.
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/ports/devel/popt.
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/ports/archivers/rpm.
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/ports/emulators/linux_base-8.
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/ports/java/linux-sun-jdk14.
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/ports/java/jdk14.

Where do I go from here?
-- 

John Lind
john at starfire.MN.ORG