MacPorts dmg installer hangs up, does not finish ?

[Bill Hernandez]

On Mar 12, 2008, at 4:55 PM, William Siegrist wrote:

> The rsync repo gets sluggish around 4-5am PDT every day due to  
> server backups and maintenance. I'm actually going to try spreading  
> out some of the load throughout the day to help... But right now,  
> you can expect the selfupdate and syncs to take up to 10m. Normally  
> on average they take 1-3m for me during the day.
>
> I was thinking that the progress bar on the installer could be  
> changed or some rsync verbose output added to make it not seem like  
> a hang, but the performance is also an issue, and I am working on it.
>
> Thanks
> -Bill

It's really funny how we get used to the way things work. The first  
modem I ever owned was used on an Apple IIe and had a speed of 300  
baud, and never managed transfer a small (few kb) file without losing  
the connection. Transfers were usually a multi-hour ordeal with very  
poor results.

Today I am fortunate to live in an area that has Fiber. I tried to get  
Residential FIOS but there was no way to get a fixed public IP, so I  
subscribed to Verizon Business FIOS 15/2 MBit/sec service and that has  
worked out very well. I've gotten used to receiving transfers from  
Apple that are sometimes as large as 90 MBytes, in what seems like a  
matter of seconds. I may be wrong but it just seems really fast.

We as a whole seem to have lost all sense of perspective, such that if  
a file takes a few minutes to download we begin think the transfer has  
hung up. This is probably what happened, I should have gone to lunch  
and checked when I came back.  There was no way from the Terminal to  
tell whether anything was happening. Something that may help others is  
perhaps a message "This may take a few minutes, come back in a while..."

I see from your response, that I should have allowed at least 10  
minutes.

I began running into a number of other problems that forced me to  
force quit applications that continuously became non-responsive. I may  
be wrong, but I suspect that upgrading Leopard directly over Tiger may  
be the cause of some of the problems.

Yesterday I completely re-formatted my primary drive, did a clean  
install of Leopard, and spent several hours downloading and installing  
the very latest versions of each application and 3rd party utility I  
own.

After I read Ryan's comments on Darwin 8 vs. Darwin 9, I thought the  
smartest thing would be to re-format and install everything from  
scratch, not just MacPorts.

Today I will try to do a clean install of MacPorts, and see how that  
goes.

Thanks to all those who replied for the help...

Bill Hernandez
ms at mac-specialist.com