>>>>> "Frederick" == Frederick Bruckman <fb@enteract.com> writes:
    Frederick> First of all, I feel it would be premature to add this functionality
    Frederick> to the pkg_* tools (considering those evident problems), so I intend
    Frederick> to create a "pkg_hack" utility with the following options...

  I think this is perfect.
  I recently went through *exactly* this with libpng (which went to
2.0). After the upgrade (via binary package compiled on another machine) my
mtr on my notebook didn't work anymore. 
  I solved it by copying an appropriate libpng (1.0) to /usr/pkg/lib, but
this would do the trick very well!!!