M1/Monterey questions

Fri Nov 26 01:59:12 UTC 2021

On Nov 25, 2021, at 18:20, Gerben Wierda wrote:

> I’ve just received a new Mac and it is the first one with M1 hardware. And of course it comes with macOS 12.

Congrats! I hope you like it.

> So, as sort of a first step, I downloaded the MacPorts Monterey package. When I ran that, macOS wanted to install rosetta, which I did. The installer launched. The installer tells me to do xcode-select —install, which I do as well before proceeding.
> 
> Anyway, my two questions:
> - How much of MacPorts is now available as M1-native?

I don't have statistics on that, but I would guess that a good portion of ports work. We've all been working on fixing issues that we find for a year now. Many ports seem to be building find on the automated build system.

Ports that are marked as supporting x86_64 but not arm64 should work fine via Rosetta 2.

If you find a port that does not build, you can file a ticket in the issue tracker.

> Apparently the installer itself isn’t?

All MacPorts installers are universal as appropriate for each OS version: the installers for 10.4-10.5 are universal ppc i386; for 10.6 they're i386 x86_64; for 10.7-10.15 they're x86_64 only; and for 11 and up they're x86_64 arm64.

Perhaps it is normal, but I would not have expected it to request to install Rosetta 2 in order to install MacPorts.

> - I migrated everything except ‘MacPorts’ from an old Mac running Big Sur using Migration Assistant. Then I installed MacPorts form the package. But It seems the migration actually moved the old stuff from /opt/local to the new Mac/. How did that happen?

The Apple migration assistant can migrate /opt/local, unless you tell it not to.

The migration assistant screws up the home directories of the macports user account and any user accounts MacPorts ports might create, so migration (using the migration assistant) of MacPorts installations is problematic.

> I was expecting a new fresh empty MacPorts. Is it best to remove /opt/local and start all over again?

When you move from one OS to another, or from one architecture to another, you must reinstall MacPorts and all ports. See https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration.