On Mar 11, 2020, at 19:14, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> As an aside, my own MacPorts is semi-trashed due to Migration Assistant 
> refusing to bring MacPorts from the old MacBook to a newer Pro, so I 
> stupidly(?) decided to do it by hand instead of starting from scratch;

I'm not sure what issue you're running into specifically, but I know of one: 
Some time after Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple changed Migration Assistant 
so that any migrated users "helpfully" have their home directories moved into 
/Users/. This breaks those users, if those users were created by MacPorts or 
its installer, since those users need to have their home directories where we 
put them. Undoing this undesired "helpfulness" is nontrivial because *for each 
affected user* you need to identify what the correct home directory is, move 
the home directory back there, and use dscl to fix its directory services entry.

This may be MacPorts' fault for creating users with UIDs >= 500. It is possible 
that if we created UIDs < 500 the migration assistant would not do this to 
them. It is worth testing. However, see https://trac.macports.org/ticket/11596 
where it is stated that UIDs < 500 are reserved by Apple. I don't know if that 
was true then or if it is still the case now.

> as a result I'm now hung up on finding a suitable Xcode for the Pro with 
> Sierra 10.12.6 and seeing all sorts of conflicting advice.

Apologies if we've already covered this in another thread, I don't remember, 
but you should have no difficulty locating the last compatible version of Xcode 
for any version of macOS by consulting 
https://trac.macports.org/wiki/XcodeVersionInfo and downloading it from 
https://developer.apple.com/download/more/?=Xcode

I see that unfortunately our guide at 
https://guide.macports.org/#installing.xcode says "Download the latest version 
of Xcode" while neglecting to add "that is compatible with your version of 
macOS". We should update the guide.

> Hint: don't believe the answers on StackOverflow; its mission in life appears 
> to be to mislead newbies...

In general that has not been my experience. I often find the answers I need at 
the Stack Overflow family of sites.

Reply via email to