Hm...I always thought that pkgsrc *did* do a forwards/backwards
update of all necessary packages.  This is why it is so painful to
do "make update": The heavy cross dependencies and conservative
approach to shared library version changes often result in huge
chunks of pkgsrc being rebuilt.  Then one package fails during
rebuild.  Then you wind up with a mess of deleted-and-not-rebuilt
packages.  I believe that on more than one occasion, I've updated
the emacs package, which depends on some graphics libraries (PNG,
JPEG, TIFF, and GIF stuff), and have seen it insist on an updated
version of those libraries---which then rebuilds a huge percentage
of my other packages (GIMP, XFig, ghostscript, TeX, ...).  This
kind of thing is why I don't keep GNOME or KDE installed, generally.
(^&  Huge, graphics-tied packages that have many sub-packages, with
a more than fair chance that at least one sub-package will break
during build.

I consider this to be an imperfect, but acceptable behavior in
exchange for a (usually) one-command update of packages.


I've seen the kind of message that you describe, but it's rare.  My
memory is that it happens only when I cannot do a successful
"make update" on the package itself to get the desired update.

Is it possible that you have altered /etc/mk.conf in some way that
affects this?

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/