I unfortunately deleted the original post, and the arechives are 
currently not fuctional, so I can't re-check or quiote properly.

 From what I understood, Jeremy's (?) problem was updating potential 
packages that are essential for the pkg mechanisms to work - thus 
uninstalling them first would effectively prevent installing the new 
version.

Isn't pkgviews an option for this situation? In case such a package 
would need to be updated that is depended upon by something that can't 
temporarily uninstalled (e.g. pkgsrc itself), the package could be 
extracted into the depot location, next to the old version, using the 
old pkg-related tools. Then the currently used pkgview could be simply 
cloned, and only the newly installed package's links updated in the 
cloned copy. This would allow e.g. testing if the newly installed 
package works correctly, and if not, the whole operation simply reverted 
to the original state. If the checks are passed, the main pkgview could 
also be updated, the cloned copy deleted, and possibly the old version 
of the package could also be deleted from the depot.

Comments?

mortee