User information about macOS Mojave

[Ryan Schmidt]

Apple has announced [1] that macOS Mojave (10.14) will be released on September 24, 2018. Mojave removes support for some older Macs; see the system requirements for more details [2].

As with any new macOS release, there are likely to be problems with several ports on this new macOS version, which it will take us time to identify, investigate and resolve. If you wish to help us with that, and you're OK with not being able to use some ports for a time, feel free to upgrade to Mojave when it's released and please send us bug report tickets or pull requests for anything that's broken.

We will set up a Mojave builder for our automated build system. Once we do, it will take weeks to build binaries of ports for Mojave. Until they're built, you should expect port installations to take more time, since more ports will need to be compiled on your computer.

If you'd prefer to run into fewer problems and want more things to just work, I recommend not upgrading to Mojave for at least a month after release.

One specific change in Mojave is the deprecation of 32-bit software. Mojave can run existing 32-bit software but can't build 32-bit software anymore [3] so MacPorts can't offer 32-bit software on Mojave. To see if this will affect you, you can get a list of the ports that you've installed with 32-bit parts by running:

port -qv installed | grep "archs=.*i386"

You won't be able to install most of those ports with 32-bit parts on Mojave. If that's a problem, don't upgrade to Mojave until 64-bit versions are available. For ports listed as being installed universal for i386 and x86_64, in most cases, you'll still be able to install them on Mojave, but only for x86_64.

-Ryan


[1] https://www.apple.com/macos/mojave/

[2] https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/faq#supported_hardware

[3] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode_release_notes/xcode_10_release_notes