Difficulty in upgrading MacPorts from El Capitan to Sierra

[Barrie Stott]

A couple of weeks ago I had a bit of spare time so I looked at the inability of my iMac to put itself to sleep: something that has caused mild irritation from time to time. Cutting a long story short it eventually involved someone from Apple Care being involved. He said that I did not have the latest OS and that might be a cause. Macports was not in my mind at the time and at his suggestion I upgraded to Sierra from El Capitan.

Some days later I realised that I needed to upgrade Macports and should probably have done it as part of my upgrade to Sierra. (By that time I had probably used several ports that were still set up for El Capitan.) I followed the Migration procedure instructions in the Migration document up to and including 3e, the last part of which caused a log of what was happening to fly past on the screen for quite some time. The procedure stopped and by that time it had installed 22 ports, none of which was on my requested list. Error files to view were mentioned in the log but none meant anything useful to me.

I have some questions:

1. After loading Sierra I noticed that the m/c was slower. Looking at a file to display a dozen or so lines in an already open Chrome browser caused a pause of several seconds. Bigger but not massive files would cause Chrome to ask if it should continue to wait for the file to load or abort the attempt for now. Could this be a sign of insufficient memory and, if so, how would I find this out?

2. I would like to be able to take a requested port and find the tree of ports that would need to be installed before this port. Does some recursive way exist to find this out or must I do each step by hand? I presume I must take account of both build and library dependencies.

I would be very grateful for any suggestions.

Barrie.