MacPorts missing links

[Ryan Schmidt]

> On Sep 12, 2016, at 10:02 PM, Al Varnell <alvarnell at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> Perhaps the Wiki page needs to state more clearly that this only needs to be done for major OS X/macOS upgrades, that is from 10.11.x to 10.12, for instance. In all the years I've been using MacPorts I have never needed to reinstall the MacPorts base for a minor upgrade.

That's correct.

Anyone may edit the wiki, if you have suggestions for how the wording could be improved to convey that more clearly.


> I would also encourage somebody to look into the need for both Xcode and Command Line Tools since Xcode 7. Apple makes it quite clear on the download page that Xcode now contains the CLTs, so installing both might well cause issues and clearly waste valuable space.

If you don't have both Xcode and the command line tools installed, some ports will fail to install. It would be nice if it were not so, but we want to avoid having users run into those kinds of problems, so for now the requirement to install both stands.

This is the ticket requesting that Xcode not be required:

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/29172

The command line tools used to be part of the Xcode installer (Xcode 3 and before) and we haven't really made any changes to that aspect of MacPorts since then. So MacPorts still assumes both parts are there.

I've successfully used a MacPorts installation without Xcode. You only really need Xcode if the port you're installing is using an SDK (most don't) or builds using an Xcode project (most don't but many GUI apps do), and you're building from source (you usually don't need to anymore, since we have an automated build system now and most ports are binary distributable).

What I would like is for there to be a way for ports to indicate if they require Xcode. The xcode portgroup would set this to true by default. There might be other cases where we want to set this to true by default, such as if configure.sdkroot is set. If we had this, then MacPorts could print a friendly error message if you try to install a port that requires Xcode but you haven't installed Xcode. Currently, you would just get a possibly confusing build failure.