Unclean macports gettext upgrade

An innocent port upgrade -uc outdated turned into macports breakage after it tried to deactivate gettext. The error messages, ad infinitum, are:

--->  Deactivating gettext @0.17_3
Error: Deactivating gettext 0.17_3 failed:
Error: Unable to upgrade port: dyld: Library not loaded:
/opt/local/lib/libintl.8.dylib
  Referenced from: /opt/local/bin/ln
  Reason: image not found
Error: Unable to exec port: dyld: Library not loaded:
/opt/local/lib/libintl.8.dylib
  Referenced from: /opt/local/bin/ln
  Reason: image not found

The reason is that I have the coreutils+with_default_names port installed, and those binaries link to the gettext libraries. The coreutils binaries are used by the macports activation scripts, and the macports coreutils are earlier on the PATH. Cue breakage.

The solution, as explained on macports-users, is:

• Add a binpath to macports.conf that has the (presumably working) Apple coreutils in /usr/bin and /bin before the macports ones
• port deactivate coreutils
• port deactivate gettext
• port activate gettext
• port activate coreutils