Migration Assistant moved MacPorts home directories

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 1, 2017, at 18:04, Mark Anderson <emer at emer.net> wrote:
> 
> I think the "best" course of action for you is to delete all the users and then follow the migration instructions. But yeah, there has to be some way to undo this damage programmatically.

I don't believe following the migration instructions will do anything useful. It's for moving to a different CPU or OS version; I'm not doing either.

Deleting ports' user accounts and their home directories, then deactivating and reactivating the ports that created them, should cause new accounts and home directories to be created in the right place. This assumes there is no useful information in the home directories; I don't know if that's the case. It also assumes there is no data anywhere else owned by those users; recreating the users would result in different user IDs.

There is certainly stuff in the MacPorts prefix that should be owned by the macports user so deleting and recreating that user would require additional cleanup in the form of changing all that ownership. I'd prefer to avoid that, so it would be simpler to just edit the NFSHomeDirectory of the macports user and move its home directory back. That could also be done with all the other users; I should be able to get the correct home directory locations by using dscl on the old computer.



I'm just unclear why I'm the first to report this problem. Has nobody used migration assistant? Or has everybody just ended up with broken installations and either not realized or not bothered to report it?