I tried Marc's suggestion with respect to dbus and Gnome packages (including gnucash): port upgrade -R dbus. Bad scene. tclsh eats infinite memory (slowly; 600-odd megabytes in 5 minutes or so) and cripples the box. Cleanup after reboot wasn't too painful, and I'm walking the gnucash -> foo -> dbus dependencies manually now; but it strikes me that this isn't the designed behavior of port. How can I analyze this situation usefully? (I speak enough Tcl to be dangerous, but am unfamiliar with the current generation of debugging tools.) On another note: gtk-sharp seems to be insistent on a libgda with the default variants, but I would prefer not to have any DB other than sqlite on this box. I most especially do not want db4 installed unless and until I research thoroughly what it takes to minimize its corruption potential on MacOS. (No slur on SleepyCat, but bdb places unusual strains on kernels, filesystems, compilers, and core libraries.) Is there a syntax for "any libgda variant will do" that I can use in the gtk-sharp portfile? (I'm hoping to get F-Spot running.) One more newbie question: is there any semi-automated way of generating a template portfile given the results of a successful manual build with the usual ./configure && make && sudo make install? I have in mind something that grovels through the build tree for shared libs and executables, generating port dependencies from the libraries that they link against, and maybe determines bash/python/perl/whatever dependencies from #! lines. gajim works for me (or rather did before the gnome fallout, and I expect will again shortly) and I'd like to wrap a portfile around it if it's not too much agony. Cheers, - Michael P. S. Intel / 10.4.8, if it matters.