For many months, the nightly security emails have been warning that db5 and gcc9 were out of date and no longer supported. Numerous attempts to remove just threw up package dependencies, so today I set out to tackle them.
gcc9 proved to be the easiest and whatever previous package had been holding it back had clearly gone and a simple sudo pkg delete gcc9 did not throw up any other package dependencies and soon went.
Not so for db5.
Webalizer, apr and apache24 still insisted on db5. All relatively mainstream packages but all still using db5. Several Googles showed others have had similar problems ever since it was first mentioned as deprecated but the amount of error messages had decreased since July,
Adding dbd=18 to make.conf as the default db version seems to have resolved the problem after a Make Deinstall Clean on apr1, apache24 and the webalizer ports. All 3 then re-built nicely and did not call in db5 which previous attempts to remove and rebuild have done.
Hopefully now after fixing PHP 8.1 and now db5 plus gcc9 the server will live on for another year as a test-bed and platform for my ramblings.