I don't know if this will be all that helpful because it is pretty old information. Bought a Mac in 2010 with Snow Leopard, but I didn't want the default install, trimmed it down to a bare minimum system that still had a desktop, disabled all possible features and removed them, etc. I think my custom footprint with XCode is less than a quarter of the default size of Snow Leopard with out Xcode. I even built an installer to install the custom snow system with the select XCode packages, but I never had to use it but for the one time in late 2010. To get MacPorts working without full installing XCode, iirc after consultig Ryan, I installed only these packages from XCode 3.6.2
DevSDK.pkg gcc4.2.pkg llvm-gcc4.2.pkg X11SDK.pkg QuickTimeSDK.pkg CoreAudioSDK.pkg OpenGLSDK.pkg DeveloperToolsCLI.pkg DeveloperToolsSystemSupport.pkg clang.pkg And MacPorts worked great for nearly a decade before I couldn't keep up with fixing broken updates and stopped updating, but the machine is still extremely stable and all the ports I use still work, just at now outdated versions and no longer being upgraded. XCode current is far more complex than 3.6.2, but I bet that underneath the behemoth of currentish XCodes there are bound to be about a dozen packages included that one could install individually and still have MacPorts work, dare I say, flawlessly. > On Feb 26, 2022, at 15:38, Dave Horsfall <d...@horsfall.org> wrote: > > On Sat, 26 Feb 2022, Peter Hancock wrote: > >> Quite. I have full Xcode, regretfully, plus the CLI tools. I'm never >> confiident that some that Macports installation needs the full thing. > > I've never wanted to find out the hard way, so I always install the full > Xcode (after a lot of digging around to find an old version -- 10.0 -- for > my ancient MacBook Pro and High Sierra). > >> Being alerted is one thing, undergoing the grief of installing The Full >> Thing is another, and uninstalling TFT afterwards yet another. (It's not >> 100% clear to me how to get rid of it, while keeping the CLT) > > I have a 500GB SSD, so space isn't a problem :-) > >> A peripheral point is the way Apple deletes "receipts" for previous >> command reinstalls, and once or twice a month, one (seemingly) has to >> jump through the well-worn hoop of touching a flag-file into existence, >> doing an Apple update, and deleting the flag afterwards. >> >> That's tolerable, but it's a chore, and a worrying one. It's tempting to >> think (falsely): if I install TFT, perhaps this nonsense will stop. >> >> The clearer this (general, TFT) topic can be made, the better. > > I'm not quite sure what this is all about; then again, as I said I always > install the full Xcode and I've never seen this problem. > > -- Dave