portupgrade questions

[Donovan R. Palmer]

Hi Gang,

A total noob here with FreeBSD, but am liking it so far. I went to run 
portupgrade for the first time and encountered quite a few problems. I have 
googled around and found some of my answers, but it's been slow going. For 
example:

cairo# portupgrade -aF
cd: can't cd to /usr/ports/devel/gnu-autoconf
** Package 'gnu-autoconf' has been removed from ports tree.

So one possibility I read to fix something like this is to uninstall and 
resintall it. This yields the following result:

cairo# pkg_info | grep gnu-autoconf
gnu-autoconf-2.59   Automatically configure source code on many Un*x 
platforms
cairo# pkg_deinstall gnu-autoconf-2.59
--->  Deinstalling 'gnu-autoconf-2.59'
pkg_delete: package 'gnu-autoconf-2.59' is required by these other packages
and may not be deinstalled:
gnu-automake-1.9.6
kde-3.5.4
kdevelop-3.3.4
** Listing the failed packages (*:skipped / !:failed)
        ! gnu-autoconf-2.59     (pkg_delete failed)
--->  Packages processed: 0 done, 0 ignored, 0 skipped and 1 failed

So how do I fix this? Is there a HOW-TO or tutorial on a webpage out there 
that will help me learn how to fix these things?  The handbook makes no 
mention of how to resolve these issues... unless I missed something?

TIA
Donovan