While maintaining one of my systems I came onto an issue with expat-2.1.0_2. It didn’t install libexpat.la. After rebuilding and installing the port a couple of times I had to cp over the file manually for cairo to build. portsnap fetch update was run just prior with no errors. 9.1-RELEASE-p22 FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE-p22 #7: Thu Nov 13 08:14:57 EST 2014