Kyle D. Skrinak

I’m slow to upgrade my OS as I prefer stability to running the latest version of code. As of 2 days ago, however, I have taken the leap to Snow Leopard (now at 10.6.2) and I am very pleased with stability and the reduced footprint of the OS. Also among my upgrade concerns is my MacPorts installation. I have a few ports that I need to have available. This time, my MacPorts migration was the smoothest yet, too. After googling, I first found this blog post about the author’s upgrade, but after reading the blog’s comments found a more reliable (not necessarily more simple  but well worth the added time) way to make the upgrade:

1. Reboot and boot using the Snow Leopard DVD.
2. Before running Snow Leopard, perform a “Disk Repair” in disk utility.
3. Run the Snow Leopard upgrade process. Both of mine were at least 45 minutes; I didn’t stick around for the upgrade.
4. After completing the Snow Leopard installation install the XCode from the Snow Leopard DVD. (This step is important)
5. Run Apple’s Software Update (have broadband ready or expect to wait for the download)
6. Download the latest MacPorts for Snow Leopard disk image.
7. Then follow the steps at the MacPorts migration page.
   1. port installed > myports.txt
   2. sudo port -f uninstall installed
   3. sudo port clean –work –archive all

This process does take up some time, but I reloaded my entire MacPorts without a hiccup, which was nice. Also nice is that my 10.5 MacPorts list contains a number of ports I no longer needed, so the cleanup was overdue. I saw none of the dependency or other issues that can happen with MacPorts.