Upgrading to Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite as a Developer | Hacker News Reader

Upgrading to Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite as a Developer

jimlindley.com

46 pointshswolff38 comments

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Isn't it safer to use the "ditto" command for the restore?

sudo mv /usr/local ~/local

then merge it back in

ditto -V ~/local /usr/local

That way it should merge all the files from the backup into the new folder (and show you what it's doing)

Thanks, I've updated the post in response to this suggestion from you & a few others. Might need to force refresh your browser to see it.

Hi all. If you want to feel better about your worst upgrade experience, I should inform you that mine started : Saturday, October 18, 2014 at 19:00 (local time Greece) and at this time is still stucked in : "2 minutes remaining" :)

Thank you Apple. I think nobody will ever beat this time!!! Not even windows v100!!! I think I'll go for the Guiness Record...

Turned on cmd-L to see where it's at and I've got several pypy versions and MacTex in there, hundreds of gigs of files. Based on this new information which I so desperately wish apple made me aware of before running, I expect my install to take at least overnight. thanks apple for your consistently declining level of software quality!

Just a warning - after 6+ hours (not sure exactly as I went to sleep) my Yosemite install failed because the log buffer was full. I can't say for sure that this would not have happened if I hadn't left the log viewer open, but I would recommend closing the log window when you're not actively using it.

All add a note about the log buffer, thanks.

Just happened again. The error is:

Line 128,493 - INSTALLER LOG SHARED BUFFER IS FUL

This time I only opened the log viewer briefly at one point during the upgrade, and again after several hours because it seemed to have hung again. I can't imagine I'm the only one who's affected by this issue. I'll report back when/if I find out how to fix it.

What did you do after this happened? Is it safe to restart the machine, or will that totally hose the install?

(Gah! HN's anti procrastination measures have kicked in so I can't login with my normal account... ) Anyway, I've got threads open at Apple ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6603910 ) and at MacRumours ( http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1803281 ) describing my situation - hopefully some kind soul will be able to help out.

In the meantime I've restarted the process one more time. The laptop still boots straight into the Yosemite installer so I don't think the hard reboots have adversely affected the machine.

edit: It occurs to me that the longest I've waited has been 12 hours (my first attempt). I've now seen reports of 15 hour installs, perhaps I didn't wait long enough? Even if the log buffer is full, that wouldn't necessarily mean that install has outright failed... hmm

I upgraded this morning. Estimates where way off. (Thanks for the CMD+L hint!) After a few hours, the Mac just reinstalled everything again. Waiting again for hours with "1 Minute" point. Worst upgrade experience with OSX ever.

Upgrade on a late 2013 rMBP took about 18 minutes (2min faster than the estimate).

  $ find /usr/local | wc -l
  24825
  $ du -sh /usr/local
  644M

If for some reason, you didn't move everything, you can see exactly what's taking so long. For me it was copying every NPM package on my machine.

https://twitter.com/kevinSuttle/status/513446291968651264 https://twitter.com/kevinSuttle/status/513447060499341313

I had 32k files using up 8GB in /usr/local, and the time spent on "2 minutes remaining" was about 45 minutes. In retrospect, I'm happy that I didn't waste any time on special preparations. One thing I learned is that the ⌘L log window blocks progression from restore to the next reboot; I lost about 15 minutes that way.

I'll add that note. People with problems tended have >100k or more files.

See my reply above. A more accurate count on a keyboard with working keys is 243185. I'm starting to wonder whether the /usr/local-related delay is naturally about an hour, but vastly increased - sometimes catastrophically - by having the log window open. Just a theory.

I've gotten messages from people who didn't even know how to open the log viewer until hours into the process, so it's just a highly variable delay depending on individual circumstances.

45 minutes, another lost 15 minutes... wow, you're install went fast! Everyone else seems to be having multiple-hours long installs. :)

It was multi-hour altogether, but the lying about two minutes remaining only took 45 minutes.

Sorry, 32k was the result of `ls -lR /usr/local | wc -l` and then typing on a keyboard with a broken 4. To be much more precise, `find /usr/local -type f | wc -l` is 243185, while (including directories and links) `find /usr/local | wc -l` is 274709.

I wish that I had read this before upgrading. I have tons of stuff installed via Homebrew, and after two hours of "2 minutes remaining," and seeing in the logs that it was "restoring" stuff from /usr/local, I gave up and went to bed.

Not sure why the article hasn't considered this, but after moving /usr/local to another location and doing the Yosemite upgrade... you can always move the newly created Yosemite files/directories in /usr/local to your old local, rather than deleting them.

I've re-written the instructions a few times since I first posted it. Once it gets into conflicts and problems I can't cover everything, and I don't want to give a dozen commands for people to paste in and run for various scenarios and then screw people up more. I'll add a note to merge instead of replace, though, thanks!

Glad to help. Seems simple enough that people might think of it.

Just a note: if your shell is set to something in `/usr/local` (e.g. `/usr/local/bin/zsh`), remember to set it back to `/bin/bash` before doing the move.

Yeah, I got caught by this so I was unable to open Terminal or iTerm. But using Terminal, I ran "Shell | Run Command...", entered "sudo chsh -s /bin/bash myuserid" and was then able to open a shell and move the local directory back.

Other than that, the upgrade was very smooth. Thanks for the help!

It seems you really must move it to ~/local or similar as the article points out. Moving to /usr/local.bak seems to still copy the files one by one into recovered items during the last stage of the installation.

What could possibly be driving this process though? What is the update actually trying to accomplish?

Good to know that it could take hours. Upgrading to Yosemite on a Macbook Air (about a month old) and it's taking a few hours so far. Didn't check /usr/local but will just let it go for now.

How large was your /usr/local folder before upgrading? Mine is currently at 12GB and I wonder whether I should try to reduce it even more.

It's really about the number of files, not the size involved. If you have hundreds of thousands of files in there, you'll have a long wait.

Well, at least I now know what the problem was! (I'm a Homebrew user, and I was at "About a minute remaining" for more than an hour...)

took me >24 hours without completing. I rebooted into the recovery partition, mounted the disk, moved aside the stuff in /usr/local and then re-installed. I dread to think how long it would have sat there burning crud into the LCD

Is there any stopping the update once it's started to move stuff around to get a better start...? Probably not, eh?

Not that I know of. If you find a way to do that I'll add it to the post.

You can hit cmd+q from the screen where it's doing the install and it will quit out and let you reboot back into your OS.

Super handy Jim, big thanks. Full install completed in 40 mins with no issues with brewed packages. ;)

Srsly, how did Apple miss this problem? This affects good percentage of Mac users…

I just upgraded, and Macports had no problem. (Macports uses /opt)

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