Ports update gone badly wrong

[Mike Jeays]

I think I have made a horrendeous mess of my workstation.  I have been
running 5.3 with no problem, and then I tried to csvup the ports files,
using the following section in ports-supfile.  Note I didn't change the
release tag!  I updated a few of the ports, including Evolution and
Firefox, and had trouble with missing libraries, such as libgthread ..
400 having been rename to ..600..

The machine now feels less stable than an old version of Windows. 
Things like Tk.pm and other Perl modules no longer work, and won't
reinstall.  I had to copy over the missing libraries for Evolution and
Firefox from another machine.

Any advice for recovery, other than a re-installation and fresh start?
What should I do next time?



# IMPORTANT: Change the next line to use one of the CVSup mirror sites
# listed at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/mirrors.html.
*default host=ftp4.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/var/db
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=.
*default delete use-rel-suffix