Strange issues while upgrading ports

[Kaya Saman]

On 11/27/2011 08:03 AM, Kevin Oberman wrote:

>
> When it has been this long, you might want to completely delete and
> re-install all ports following the instructions in the portmaster man
> page examples. This will assure that EVERYTHING is properly cleaned
> up. No obsolete libraries, header files, data files, or anything else.
> It's the 11 step process and please read the relevant example in its
> entirety to make sure you don't waste too much time. If your system
> has a very large number of ports installed, consider using the -P
> option to use packages when they are available.
>
> I do see some ports that might benefit from CPU specific
> optimizations. If you feel that these are important, re-install these
> after you finish the basic re-installation.

I discovered in the UPDATING file that it claims the same thing:

20100409:
   AFFECTS: users of lang/php5
   AUTHOR: ale at FreeBSD.org

   As of PHP 5.3, a few extensions were removed from or included into 
the core
   PHP5 package.  Follow the steps below to update your installation.

   1) Delete the following packages (if installed):

      - php5-dbase
      - php5-ncurses
      - php5-pcre
      - php5-spl
      - php5-ming
      - php5-mhash

   2) Rebuild lang/php5 and all ports that depend on it.


The only problem is how to go about it?

I mean I have quite a few web based monitoring apps (cacti, zabbix, 
munin, etc) which all depend on PHP5 + apache22 so am not really sure if 
running:

make deinstall on each port is wise.... especially since I don't want 
the config files do be deleted (even though backed up) or backend 
database information to be get lost either.