OS upgrading tips to minimise overhead (rebuilding etc)

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Friday February 23 2024 21:55:53 Clemens Lang wrote:

>You did not include the version you're upgrading from, so this is

Sorry, 10.9.5 . Last time I upgraded was from 10.6, and that was a sufficiently cumbersome that I haven't been able to motivate myself to see how much more time it would cost me to get everything working again the way *I* want. That last time it took me months, and I had way fewer ports installed which were also all a lot less costly to build.

>is, not rebuilding the ports on upgrade is unsupported.

Don't worry, I'm not asking for support related to not having rebuilt all my ports. I seem to recally someone confirming in the past that it's possible to rebuild ports more or less one by one, probably only when upgrading them rather than immediately after upgrading the OS. That's what I had in mind too. 

>versions. Of course that'll also mean that you can't install security or
>other updates for your old ports, so I'd advise against it.

I don't get that?
I old binaries continue to work, what would make it impossible to use an old dependency with a newly rebuilt dependent, or a newly rebuilt dependency with a non-rebuilt dependent?
This is assuming that Apple doesn't include a whole series of old, ABI-incompatible system library runtimes that you can't link against (which could lead to issues because having multiple versions in memory).

I could of course upgrade to an older outdated OS that still allows me to run a new enough Firefox version.

FWIW, there's a Chromium Legacy project that provides a current Chromium release for even older OS X versions than mine. It's got a horribly bloated UI though, and there are stability issues esp. with extensions.

R.