Trouble building abiword in the Ports Collection

[Perry Hutchison]

What I have done:
* Installed 6.1, including the Ports Collection, from CD.
* Ran portsnap fetch.
* Attempted portsnap update.
  ? It sez this only works after an extract.  What is the point of
    installing the collection from CD if it has to be completely
    reinstalled from a download anyway?
* Ran portsnap extract.
* Built richtext, apparently successfully.
* Attempted to build abiword.  It complained about a glibc version
  problem, and said to run gnomelogalyzer.sh.  gnomelogalyzer.sh
  found nothing specific, but said to run 'portupgrade -a' on general
  principles.
  ? Why should this be needed?  Shouldn't a freshly-downloaded
    portsnap already be up to date?
* Attempted 'portupgrade -a'.  It ran for several hours, fetching
  and building a huge amount of stuff (most of which I don't think
  I want), and pausing several times for answers to imponderable
  configuration questions, before eventually failing.
  ? Shouldn't those configuration screens have a "help" function, for
    those of us who have no clue what some of the options amount to?
* Reran 'portupgrade -a' to get a smaller logfile, showing only the
  errors (since presumably the successful builds won't be redone).
  This time it complains about the pkgdb.
  ? Now what?  Is it time to "rm -rf /usr/ports /var/db/pkg" and
    start completely over (and if so, what should I do differently
    this time)?

=============== logfile from second 'portupgrade -a' ===============

# date ; portupgrade -a ; date
Fri Sep  1 10:34:20 PDT 2006
[Updating the pkgdb <format:bdb_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db: unexpected file type or format -- Invalid argument; rebuild needed] [Rebuilding the pkgdb <format:bdb_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... [Updating the pkgdb <format:bdb_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db: unexpected file type or format -- Invalid argument; rebuild needed] [Rebuilding the pkgdb <format:bdb_btree> in /var/db/pkg ... /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db: unexpected file type or format -- Invalid argument: Cannot update the pkgdb!]: Cannot update the pkgdb!]
Command failed [exit code 1]: /usr/local/sbin/pkgdb -aFQ
Fri Sep  1 10:34:24 PDT 2006
# ls -l /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  5963776 Sep  1 01:42 /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db
# file /var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db
/var/db/pkg/pkgdb.db: Berkeley DB 1.85/1.86 (Btree, version 3, native byte-order)