Ruby, please stop Core Dumping...

It has been a while since I last ran cvsup on my ports collection. To my surprise I ran into a bit of a jam when I ran: cvsup -g -L 2 /etc/stable-supfile. I received a hideous error which looked something like this:

root@:/usr/ports> portupgrade -ar
[Updating the pkgdb in /var/db/pkg ... - 472 packages found (-1 +0) (...)/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:467: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-07-29) [i386-freebsd4]

Garance Alistair Drosehn made a post to lucky.freebsd.ports newsgroup, which in my opinion was the best result I found after searching for solutions to this fix. This post was as follows:

Try adding the following two
lines to /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf :

ENV['PKG_DBDRIVER'] = "bdb_hash"
ENV['PORTS_DBDRIVER'] = "bdb_hash"

Add them down where other environment variables are set, such as
ENV['PORTSDIR'] ||= '/usr/ports'

I must also mention that issuing:

root@:/usr/ports> pkgdb -fu

worked wonders and fixed the problem, now no more core dumps on portupgrade. I wonder what caused this problem.