do I have to reinstall my ports after upgrading to Monterey?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 31, 2021, at 17:53, Artemio González López wrote:

> 1. Is there an easy check which ones of my previously installed ports weren’t installed?

You have a text file listing the ports you previously installed on macOS 11.

You have the instructions for how you created that file. You can use those same instructions, modifying the output filename, to create a new file listing the ports that are now installed on macOS 12.

Then you can compare the two files in your favorite editor or file comparison program.


> 2. Why was port complaining that the macOS 12 SDK wasn’t installed, if I did install the 13.1 command line tools manually (from a package)?

Since you mentioned qt5, it has a bug which causes this message to appear.

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/61736


> 3. What should I do to restore my previous installation (i.e., should I start from scratch or could I just install the ports that weren’t installed in the first run, provided I find out which ones were they)?

If you mean downgrading back to macOS 11, that's not something Apple makes easy to do. I suppose you would erase the drive, reinstall macOS 11, then restore your latest Time Machine backup from before upgrading to macOS 12, losing any changes you had made after upgrading to macOS 12. Restoring a Time Machine backup also messes up the home directories of the macports user and of any user accounts created by ports you had installed, which must be manually fixed.

If you mean keeping your macOS 11 set of ports while staying on macOS 12, you could restore just /opt/local and /Applications/MacPorts and any MacPorts files from /Library/LaunchDaemons from your Time Machine backup. You can't use MacPorts to upgrade your ports then (until you reinstall MacPorts for macOS 12) but probably most of the ports compiled for macOS 11 will work as is on macOS 12 if you don't touch them. You can then wait a month or two and then check if the issues you had encountered have been fixed (Cc yourself on the Trac tickets to be notified) and then try the migration process again.

If you mean getting the ports that aren't building on macOS 12 building on macOS 12, we'd all love to know. If you can provide solutions to those issues, please do.