Xcode 12 on Catalina?

[Richard L. Hamilton]

I had a problem recently that may have been due to Xcode 12, with the convertlit port, where the code was missing some include files and declarations that really should have been there. That was fixed, and I'm ok since then with Xcode 12 on Catalina. There may have been some earlier problems, but that one was recent enough that I remember it.

However, while I have a lot (1630) of ports installed, I certainly have NOT built every port, let alone every variant of every port. So it's likely there are some problems yet to be found.

If you're paranoid, check for tickets on all your ports; or at least, maybe not the libraries that most people would have to install anyway, but for the ports likely to be less widely used.

There's an option to let MacPorts collect some statistics; I don't do it, because I don't give away info for only indirect benefit. If I could obtain a periodic report showing approximate usage levels for (only) the ports I had installed, and maybe have a script to do a bulk ticket query for the least-used ones, that would give me some direct benefit, an awareness of where the risks were likeliest in something like an Xcode update, so I could decide whether any of those were show-stoppers.

Given the limited number of people involved and that it's free, everyone is a bit the guinea pig. Although it might be nice if build farm failures automatically generated tickets, but doing that in a way that didn't generate too many duplicate/spammy tickets and was really useful, might be harder than just saying it'd be nice. :-)

Usually a newer version of Xcode is a minor-to-moderate risk; and within a month or two at most, is not much of a problem. As a last resort, it's usually possible to remove it and re-install the older version from a download rather than from the Mac App store. So if I had only one system, or didn't have one I was willing to take risks on, I'd be slow to update Xcode; but where the risk was acceptable, I'd probably update within a week, just so as not to see the badge on the App Store icon.

Things could get interesting for at least awhile for upcoming Apple Silicon (ARM architecture) systems. But this isn't the first transition; there was PowerPC to Intel, and getting rid of 32-bit for Catalina. There's some breakage on the latter, insofar as the Wine port may not be ready yet (without some tricky additional work, 64-bit Wine could only run 64-bit Windows executables), but mostly the record has been good, if one considers the very limited resources for MacPorts.



> On Oct 15, 2020, at 22:32, Richard Cobbe <rcobbe at rcobbe.net> wrote:
> 
> I've been putting off the upgrade to XCode 12 for a while, since I kinda
> got burned by the upgrade from 10 to 11.  I haven't seen any reports of
> problems with the new version, but I thought I'd ask -- any reason not to
> upgrade at this point?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Richard
>