delete in post-destroot is ineffective, how to make it effective?

[Jim DeLaHunt]

I have encountered another obstacle as a Portfile newbie.

I am breaking a single upstream codebase into subports. I want each 
subport to contribute some of the overall complement of files. But the 
"make install" of the codebase installs more files than I want. Thus I 
think the right thing to do is to declare a post-destroot which delete 
the excess files from each subport.

My Portfile has an entry like this:

     post-destroot {
         set sharedir ${prefix}/share
         delete ${prefix}/lib/libfreeciv.a
         delete ${sharedir}/doc ${sharedir}/man ${sharedir}/locale
     }

But, when I run "sudo port destroot freeciv-server", then look at what I 
believe is the destroot:

ls $(port work freeciv-server)/destroot/opt/local/share

the directories which I wanted to delete are still present.

I look in the main.log for this subport. I don't see any diagnostics 
from those delete directives.

How can I remove the unwanted files from what the port installs? How can 
I make these delete directives effective?

Thank you in advance for your help. Best regards,
      —Jim DeLaHunt