migration question

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 10, 2015, at 12:44 PM, René J.V. Bertin wrote:

> The issue around the root backdoor has me re-evaluating how much longer I'm going to postpone upgrading. One thing that's certainly not helping is the time I know I'll spend rebuilding all of my ports if I do things the official way.
> 
> To what extent is it possible to avoid (= prepare) this? We get the 10.10 SDK anyway, so shouldn't it be possible to build against that, setting the min. OS X compatibility version to 10.9?

If you use default prefix, and use default variants for most ports, you'll get binaries for many of them, so if your internet connection is reasonably fast, it shouldn't take long to reinstall most ports. There may be some exceptions which would take time to build of course. But migration is also an opportunity for you to take stock of the ports you've installed any maybe cull some you don't need anymore.

I'm not going to discuss ways of circumventing the migration strategy. It's the strategy we've used for many years and it works. It would be great if it were not necessary, but there are too many variables. Potentially each port's build system might have some code in it that activates only on certain versions of OS X, so the safest way to make sure you're getting the correct software for your OS X version is to build the software on that OS X version.