wrestling with b*rked package/ports collection

[paul beard]

I seem to be in a loop where expat and gettext will somehow not install 
in such a way as to serve as valid dependencies. I have rebuilt either 
directly or as part of building something else countless times, as well 
as installing from a package. For whatever reason, expat seems to be 
missing something:

Error: shared library "expat.5" does not exist

portupgrade -f, installing from source, installing from a package: all 
seem to fail. And since it and/or gettext are core dependencies for 
everything else, it seems, there's not much progress being made. Any 
other sage advice?


--
Paul Beard
<www.paulbeard.org/>
paulbeard [at] mac.com