portupgrade questions

[Donovan R. Palmer]

> The thing you should be doing first is checking /usr/ports/UPDATING. Major 
> things can change, and portupgrade may not be able to handle them without 
> help.

Ah, i c. I am starting to make sense out of some of this from my fighting 
around on this.

> The "-f" option to pkg_delete/pkg_deinstall will force it to do the 
> action, even if there are dependencies.  Sometimes it's the only way.
>
> There's also the -o option to portupgrade.
>
> As for a tutorial: first, check UPDATING.  Then the command man page. If 
> necessary, a web search.

I have done some web searching, but haven't found anything that has 
everything in one place (including the Handbook).  Once I emerge from all of 
this, I might take a stab at writing up something for N00bs to help them 
learn some of the things that I have figured out the hard way

> I can't remember what I did for this particular upgrade, but do remember 
> deleting some of the older autoconf ports manually.  I suspect you could 
> delete all of them (and maybe some or all of the automake ports) and then 
> just deinstall and install autotools.  (Like pkg_delete -f, "make 
> deinstall" in a port will ignore dependencies and just go ahead.)
>
> After you do all that, you'll probably need to run pkgdb -F to fix or at 
> least check dependencies.

Very helpful!  Thanks!