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List:       macports-users
Subject:    Does MacPorts need ALL of Xcode?
From:       Ian Wadham <iandw.au () gmail ! com>
Date:       2021-09-26 3:52:22
Message-ID: E15DA0A0-DFA1-445B-B382-29153106D7F3 () gmail ! com
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Hi guys,

I have recently upgraded my MacOS from High Sierra 10.13 to Catalina 10.15, mainly \
because I would like to start playing with a package called Flutter, which has a \
dependency on Xcode 12+ in its MacBook version.

It appears that Xcode is following some variant of Grosch's Law, or maybe Parkinson's \
Law (software expands to fill the hardware space available to it). So I am wondering, \
if all a user needs are some MacPorts packages, whether it is necessary to install \
all (or even any) of Xcode just to get the command-line tools.

I have been using MacPorts to get access to FOSS for more than 10 years and have \
watched the Xcode requirement grow from around 1 Gb of disk to around 20 Gb in \
Catalina. In Xcode 9, on High Sierra, the requirement was around 10 Gb. So it has \
roughly doubled in two version steps of MacOS.

At first I used to regard the Xcode overhead as being like some sort of tax on the \
pleasure of using FOSS, but now it is taking up an unhealthy portion of the 250 Gb in \
my MacBook Pro's 250 Gb internal SSD drive.

I have to put up with this if I wish to use Macports and Flutter, even though, like \
Dave Horsfall, I am unlikely to use Xcode as an IDE. So is it possible to have \
MacPorts depend on some minimal subset of Xcode?

Cheers,
Ian Wadham.


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