If you are getting to this stage by 'make replace OLDNAME=gnome2-utils', or anything beyond 'make replace', please include that important detail.
Ok, I will in the future.
Look in work, and you'll see .replace_oldname and .replace_newname. It looks above like .replace_oldname is not set to something that matches an installed package. Check the value against pkg_info. I just added a better error message, but the problem is probably that oldname is empty.
.replace_oldname indeed is empty. Any solution to solve this?