High Sierra and X11 Support Issues

Sat Sep 30 04:04:20 UTC 2017

I would not expect a lot of program incompatibility issues from APFS, aside from with third-party filesystem related utilities and perhaps backup utilities - although IIRC, one cannot share APFS filesystems using AFP (which is deprecated anyway), but only with SMB or NFS; and APFS doesn't yet support Fusion drives (it did at one point, but that was disabled presumably pending more work on that, and it's expected to again in the future).

However, sites like arstechnica.com <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/macos-10-13-high-sierra-the-ars-technica-review/>  (usually some pretty sharp macOS reviews there) have said that although it should be fine for most people, if you don't really need to update right away, you might want to hold off for .1 or .2.  "Recommendations: Look before you leap <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/macos-10-13-high-sierra-the-ars-technica-review/9/#h7>."  It takes awhile for a new filesystem to become proven, and if there's going to be data loss, you might prefer that it happens to someone else.  APFS has been tested reasonably well IMO, and an early version was in Sierra (although not usable there as a boot volume); so it's certainly not as if they're rushing it, but a .0 of anything tends to be slightly higher in risk or problems.  If you're supporting others, you want to take those problems on before you update their systems so you won't have angry users and extra phone calls; but otherwise, let others suffer first, unless you're well able to cope, and have the time to spare. :-)

To some extent, that also goes for the possible impact on any other third-party software, including non-vendor-supported open source; although with the latter, people do have to participate a little or it won't get better.

I tend to like to update most things fairly early; but I also use sites like https://roaringapps.com/apps <https://roaringapps.com/apps> to see what people have been saying about app compatibility, follow macrumors.com <http://macrumors.com/> and arstechnica.com <http://arstechnica.com/>, etc, so that I at least have an idea what I'm getting myself into.  And I don't actually need whatever system I'm updating to be working great right away, but I'd prefer not to have to spend more than a couple of days ironing out most of the issues.  I'm in no rush to update this time though, just to be safe.  And the first system I'd update (my laptop, which is the one I use most directly most of the time), has good backups.

In some future OS update one or more years from now, 32-bit app support will probably get dropped, at which time, a bunch of no longer maintained apps will stop working.  That happened on iDevices with iOS 11.  Cleaning those out may be wise anyway, if they're not essential, since they haven't had security and other fixes for awhile.  But it's disruptive, and sometimes expensive; even if sooner or later, inevitable.

> On Sep 29, 2017, at 21:22, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sep 29, 2017, at 15:05, Merton Campbell Crockett wrote:
> 
>> I’ve just installed a new 27” iMac with Retina 5K display to replace a failed Mac Pro.  I vaguely recall seeing a mention of potential issues with macOS High Sierra and Xquartz and MacPorts.  Is this related to Apple’s new AFPS file system architecture?
>> 
>> I had planned to download and install macOS High Sierra this weekend.  Should I hold off downloading it?
> 
> One person mentioned a problem with Xquartz on Sierra, which was resolved by reinstalling Xquartz.
> 
> https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/2017-September/043755.html
> 
> I mentioned that since High Sierra is new, at this time you may expect to encounter more issues with MacPorts software on High Sierra than you would on Sierra. You'll also have to build more ports from source, since we have not yet built all ports for High Sierra on our build server. We also haven't made a binary installer of MacPorts for High Sierra yet, so you'll have to build MacPorts itself from source.
> 
> https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/2017-September/043743.html
> 

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