selfupdate to MacPorts 2.0.0: This could take awhile...

[Ryan Schmidt]

As you may know, during the upgrade to MacPorts 2.0.0, selfupdate will convert your installed ports into a new format. There is no progress indication while this happens [1]. If you selfupdate using verbose mode, the last thing you'll see printed while this happens is "This could take awhile..." This can be a bit of an understatement: on my 466-MHz Power Mac G4, with 333 ports installed, "awhile" was just over two hours, certainly much longer than selfupdate usually takes. This conversion is not a CPU-intensive activity; if you look in Activity Monitor, you'll see high disk and possibly memory use, but not CPU use. The more ports you have installed, the more time it will take to convert. So if selfupdate is taking awhile, don't cancel it; just make sure you have plenty of disk space available and let it run, overnight if necessary.


[1] https://trac.macports.org/ticket/30347