Issues self updating Macports

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Mar 11, 2020, at 19:14, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> As an aside, my own MacPorts is semi-trashed due to Migration Assistant refusing to bring MacPorts from the old MacBook to a newer Pro, so I stupidly(?) decided to do it by hand instead of starting from scratch;

I'm not sure what issue you're running into specifically, but I know of one: Some time after Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple changed Migration Assistant so that any migrated users "helpfully" have their home directories moved into /Users/. This breaks those users, if those users were created by MacPorts or its installer, since those users need to have their home directories where we put them. Undoing this undesired "helpfulness" is nontrivial because *for each affected user* you need to identify what the correct home directory is, move the home directory back there, and use dscl to fix its directory services entry.

This may be MacPorts' fault for creating users with UIDs >= 500. It is possible that if we created UIDs < 500 the migration assistant would not do this to them. It is worth testing. However, see https://trac.macports.org/ticket/11596 where it is stated that UIDs < 500 are reserved by Apple. I don't know if that was true then or if it is still the case now.

> as a result I'm now hung up on finding a suitable Xcode for the Pro with Sierra 10.12.6 and seeing all sorts of conflicting advice.

Apologies if we've already covered this in another thread, I don't remember, but you should have no difficulty locating the last compatible version of Xcode for any version of macOS by consulting https://trac.macports.org/wiki/XcodeVersionInfo and downloading it from https://developer.apple.com/download/more/?=Xcode

I see that unfortunately our guide at https://guide.macports.org/#installing.xcode says "Download the latest version of Xcode" while neglecting to add "that is compatible with your version of macOS". We should update the guide.

> Hint: don't believe the answers on StackOverflow; its mission in life appears to be to mislead newbies...

In general that has not been my experience. I often find the answers I need at the Stack Overflow family of sites.