The time has come..it would seem. Is it easy? It all depends. It wasn’t seamless but we are working again, sort of. Also it seems Apple consider /var to be a system directory and not for use by user installed code but I have only found one program (written by me) impacted, which I initially assumed was based on a breach of standards, I use /var, but on closer inspection, also fails because the Xcode download/install fails.  Here are my notes on the OS install, /var and Xcode.

The download of the installer works fine, but the install process fails with a “failure to unpack Essentials.pkg”. This takes me to this article on Apple’s support community site.  It blames the failure on the detection of 3rd party memory.

It recommends the replacement of the 3rd party RAM; however it also recommends running a permissions repair utility(from the installer) which didn’t work and an internet recovery, which did. The latter escalating remediation was proposed by someone who was certain that they had no 3rd party RAM. I had a fright when the startup disk manager couldn’t see either of the disks as I tried to roll back to Yosemite, but all’s well that ends well. Actually, I found the not with third party memory story completely believable; when will these people, and Apple aren’t the only sinners realise that they have sold the product to people and they have a right to use & enhance the machine as they see fit.

The Apple page I used to guide me through the internet OS recovery is here…

As I said in the prequel it’s blown away my ‘refresh’ aka Macports logs and logrotate configs which I held in /var/logs; going to have to move them to /usr/local or something. Not /usr/local, they’ll consider that a system directory.

Macports & refresh are both broken.

Xcode won’t self upgrade!  See apple.stackexchange. This was seemingly fixed by deleting the install log and giving it a fresh one. I examined it first to determine the reason for failure and couldn’t find one, I ran an upgrade with a tail -f  and it failed with a good last message in the log timestamped several minutes earlier than the failure. So I planned to run a further test, with a fresh install log to capture the error message and it ran successfully. I issued an rm command under sudo and let the installer recreate the log. It was by now the only outstanding update. It is unlikely that I had insufficient space, but the hint that it was a write error, and the hang on the error log message suggested that something in this area was the problem.

Problems with Macports remain. Macports have a page here…., which among other thigns talks about installing Xcode and MacUpdate have a page/thread here. There is a new version of Xcode waiting to be downloaded.

ooOOOoo

The image is from Techradar’s OS X 10.11 El Capitan review.
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