Blimey, but that was a huge update...

[Dave Horsfall]

MacBook Pro mid-2010, 4GB, 400GB SSD, Sierra 10.12.6.

Started my weekly "port selfupdate; port upgrade outdated" (what, don't 
you update your ports every week?) yesterday morning at 0813, and is just 
finished today at 0615.  I'll allow that I missed a prompt when I was out 
for about 3 hours, but that's still a good chunk of a day with the CPU 
running flat-strap at around 80˚ and getting the spinning beachball a lot 
(and I haven't even gotten around to re-installing Xcode yet, when 
Migration Assistant failed to copy it from the old box).

Looks like a good chunk was recompiled, the major culprits being LLVM and 
GCC and friends.

Are there no longer any binaries for Sierra?  I might give High Sierra a 
go (as some here condoned) but the dealer recommends staying with Sierra; 
whom am I to believe?  Installing High Sierra takes quite a few hours from 
past experience, but at least if/when it fails it rolls back to Sierra.

Note that I do not have the installation media; a workaround for one of 
the failure modes was to reinstall, interrupt it before the actual 
installation, and squirrel away some obscure file that gets deleted (the 
other failure mode was something to do with the firmware; the old box ran 
6,1 but this one is 7,1).

-- Dave