`port selfupdate; port upgrade outdated' fails

["René J.V. Bertin"]

Unrelated similar symptoms: on my 10.6.8 system port upgrade outdated also failed, specifically on llvm-3.3 . My default compiler is Apple's gcc-4.2 . I finally managed to bootstrap the upgrade process by using macports-gcc-4.7 to build first clang-3.3 and then llvm-3.3 . As a result I don't have the log files anymore ...
The only port I had to uninstall in the end was inkscape; all compilers I tried (gcc-4.2, llvm-gcc-4.2, clang-mp-3.3, gcc-mp-47) either raised an error on seemingly correct C++ code (pointing to a macro wreaking havoc?) or crashed.

In the process I also discovered that using macports-gcc-4.7 to build universal variants results in 32bit binaries ... but I guess that's hardly news.