Does MacPorts need ALL of Xcode?

[Ian Wadham]

Hi guys,

I have recently upgraded my MacOS from High Sierra 10.13 to Catalina 10.15, mainly because I would like to start playing with a package called Flutter, which has a dependency on Xcode 12+ in its MacBook version.

It appears that Xcode is following some variant of Grosch’s Law, or maybe Parkinson’s Law (software expands to fill the hardware space available to it). So I am wondering, if all a user needs are some MacPorts packages, whether it is necessary to install all (or even any) of Xcode just to get the command-line tools.

I have been using MacPorts to get access to FOSS for more than 10 years and have watched the Xcode requirement grow from around 1 Gb of disk to around 20 Gb in Catalina. In Xcode 9, on High Sierra, the requirement was around 10 Gb. So it has roughly doubled in two version steps of MacOS.

At first I used to regard the Xcode overhead as being like some sort of tax on the pleasure of using FOSS, but now it is taking up an unhealthy portion of the 250 Gb in my MacBook Pro’s 250 Gb internal SSD drive.

I have to put up with this if I wish to use Macports and Flutter, even though, like Dave Horsfall, I am unlikely to use Xcode as an IDE. So is it possible to have MacPorts depend on some minimal subset of Xcode?

Cheers,
Ian Wadham.