port upgrade -R dbus goes bananas, plus a couple of newbie Q's

[Michael K. Edwards]

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.