Downgrading to 10.6.8 from 10.7.5 -- Now what?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Nov 3, 2012, at 19:07, Michael_google gmail_Gersten wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Lawrence Velázquez <larry.velazquez at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Nov 3, 2012, at 6:05 PM, Michael_google gmail_Gersten <keybounce at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> > I have "downgraded" my system from 10.7.5 to 10.6.8.
>> >
>> > Now, what do I need to do to make Macports happy?
>> 
>> A bit unorthodox, but you should probably follow the migration instructions as if you'd done an upgrade.
>> 
>> http://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration
> 
> OK, those migration instructions are a disaster!
> 
> Please, by the time I realized I needed a list of requested ports -- for running the script at the end, it was gone.
> 
> > The requested status of the ports will also not be preserved, since it is not available to the script.
> 
> I'm looking at a file -- myports.txt -- that is useless to me:
> 
> keybouncembp:~ michael$ head myports.txt 
>   apple-gcc42 @5666.3_7 platform='darwin 11' archs='x86_64'
>   apple-gcc42 @5666.3_9 (active) platform='darwin 11' archs='x86_64'
>   cctools @822_2+llvm30 platform='darwin 11' archs='x86_64'
>   cctools @829_1+llvm30 (active) platform='darwin 11' archs='x86_64'
>   cctools-headers @822_2 platform='darwin 11' archs='noarch'
> ...

Well it's not "useless": it tells you what ports were installed, and you can feet that to the automated script to reinstall them. If you don't care about older versions or ports that are inactive, you can filter those out of the list, for example:

$ grep '(active)' myports.txt


> As soon as I saw this, I realized I was much better off getting the list of requested ports, and working from that, rather than trying to make sense of multiple versions of different ports that were no longer needed -- but all the requested information is now gone!

By "gone" I assume you mean that running "port installed requested" (or presumably any other "port" command) is returning an error of some kind? I wouldn't be surprised by that, since MacPorts itself does link with some system libraries, like curl, and the versions of those libraries are sometimes different between OS releases.


> Additionally:
> > sudo port clean all
> 
> is trying to clean every port known to macports, whether or not I've ever seen it -- not only does it take forever, for all I know it's creating directories and status files for each port as it goes.

Yes, it can take awhile, but you can just let it run. It's *removing* the work directories and status files, for those ports where they existed. If you don't want to wait and you want to do a little more manual work, you can take a look inside the directory /opt/local/var/macports/build, and from the names of the directories in there, figure out which ports are not clean, and clean just those manually.


> So ... I'm hosed. My port registry is now useless.
> 
> Restoring from Time Machine, and reviewing what I had as "requested", and going from there instead.

That's also an option.