

Upgrading to Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite as a Developer - hswolff
https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/

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digiguru69
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)

~~~
jlindley
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.

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lmousselimis
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...

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zzzeek
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!

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ivarv
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.

~~~
jlindley
All add a note about the log buffer, thanks.

~~~
ivarv
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.

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

~~~
borked_borked
(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](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6603910)
) and at MacRumours (
[http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1803281](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

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rmetzler
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.

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falsedan
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

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kevinSuttle
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/513446291968651264)
[https://twitter.com/kevinSuttle/status/513447060499341313](https://twitter.com/kevinSuttle/status/513447060499341313)

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podsnap
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.

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

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

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reuven
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.

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cbsmith
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.

~~~
jlindley
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!

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

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danbee
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.

~~~
geneticgrabbag
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!

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brettporter
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.

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

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bhartzer
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.

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codesix
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.

~~~
zwily
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.

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gothick
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...)

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michae1m
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

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CWSpear13
Is there any stopping the update once it's started to move stuff around to get
a better start...? Probably not, eh?

~~~
PatrickTulskie
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.

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

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

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

