Shared Object Woes (or, why I shouldn't play in the ports tree)

[Edward Aronyk]

Just a heads up: I did a search of the archives before posting this and
found several posts that sort of answer my question, but none that
answer it completely so I am posting this. If my question has been
answered elsewhere I am sorry for wasting your time and only ask that
someone direct me to where I can find an answer.

System details in case they help:
FreeBSD 4.8 (RELENG_4_8)
Compaq Proliant 1600R with SMP
Raid using the ida driver

A little while ago I wanted to install gkrellm2 from ports with the
server only option(GKRELLM_SERVER_ONLY=yes) as X isn't installed on the
server. While doing this I encountered errors that said I would need to
deinstall expat and gettext then install the new versions. I dutifully
complied and was rather horrified at the state my system was left in. A
bunch of applications (like nano) complained about not finding
libintl.so.X. I followed the advice in the archives and recompiled the
affected programs and they seem to work now.

However, when I return to my build of gkrellm2 I encounter the same
problems as before. The build dies with this error message:

########################################################
===>  Configuring for gkrellm-2.1.28_2
===>  Building for gkrellm-2.1.28_2
/usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libintl.so.5" not found
*** Error code 1
 
Stop in /usr/ports/sysutils/gkrellm2.
########################################################

I don't understand what I would recompile in order to fix this.

Also, my apache is complaining about not being able to find
libexpat.so.4 when I try to use apachectl. I can only conclude that if I
were ever to attempt to restart apache in it's current condition the
operation would fail. Since this is a production server I'm a little
concerned about messing with anything. Is the only solution to this a
recompile of apache?

Also, how do I avoid this in the future? Just leave any ports that could
cause damage if they're removed in place? Is there a better way?

Thanks for your time,
Edward Aronyk