macOS Tahoe Problems

General Issues

First of all, please read Migration.

Check the status of Tahoe builders ​here if you prefer to install prebuilt binaries. It can take several weeks after a new MacOS release before builders are working for both x86_64 and arm64.

Updating MacPorts Base

MacPorts must be installed in a version configured for macOS 26 Tahoe. If you update from an older OS version, you need to run port migrate to reinstall MacPorts base and installed ports that are not OS-independent (see link above).

Ensure you have Xcode 26.0 or greater installed and selected (e.g. sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer), and that you have the command line tools installed (xcode-select --install). (See below for a potential problem when upgrading from older CLT versions.) You also have to agree to the license by running sudo xcodebuild -license.

There have been reports that the -license option might not be sufficient alone, and following command might be required to agree to the license: sudo xcodebuild -runFirstLaunch

Compiling C++ fails

The installer for the Command Line Tools for Xcode 16 and later may not delete a directory that was installed by some older versions of the CLTs, which unfortunately causes clang++ to look in the wrong place for C++ headers. The majority of ports that contain C++ code will fail to build as a result.

The fix is to delete the stray directory if it exists: sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/include/c++

Then clean the ports that failed to build, and try again.

Ticket: #70750

Trace mode not working

Building ports in trace mode (i.e. with the -t option) will fail on Apple Silicon systems running Tahoe. This appears to be due to new security features in Ventura+. This issue is being followed in Ticket: #66358

Rosetta 2

A number of MacPorts portfiles and MacPorts base assume that arm64 Macs will have Rosetta 2 installed; you will likely run into issues if you have not installed it. Note that Rosetta 2 is not installed by default, or when running x86_64 binaries from the command line — you must open an application that has only x86_64 code in it to get the prompt to install Rosetta 2, or run softwareupdate --install-rosetta in a terminal window.

Metal toolchain is no longer bundled in Xcode

Xcode 26 no longer bundles the Metal toolchain. Some ports, at least qt6-qtwebengine, do require it and will thus fail to build. The solution is to ensure that MacPorts has been updated to 2.11.6, and to install the Metal toolchain separately:

sudo port selfupdate
xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain

Alone, that doesn't work out-of-the-box at least with Xcode 26.0.1 and MacPorts 2.11.6. A few additional steps are needed after installing the toolchain with the command given above:

on x86_64 only—note that this command may show a “Usage:” line, which is fine:

sudo diskutil eject $(xcodebuild -showComponent MetalToolchain | sed -E -n -e 's/^Toolchain Search Path: (.*)$/\1/p')

then for all systems:

sudo --user=macports xcodebuild -showComponent MetalToolchain
sudo rm -f "$(sudo --user=macports getconf DARWIN_USER_TEMP_DIR)/xcrun_db"

Shoutout to Mark Mentovai for all his detective work to workaround to resolve this problem! See #73008 for more details.

Tickets for Broken Ports

#72712

glib2 @2.78.4_2+x11: error: "_LIBCPP_ENABLE_ASSERTIONS has been removed, please use _LIBCPP_HARDENING_MODE instead"

#72773

ghc @9.12.2_1: Missing (or bad) C libraries: m, dl, ffi

#73012

fizz @2024.09.23.00_4: compilation error for extensions/delegatedcred/Serialization.cpp

#73034

emacs +x11 under Tahoe 26.0 has a black bar covering menu

#73038

nomad: invalid array length -delta * delta (constant -256 of type int64)

#73039

gdmap @0.8.1: autogen.sh errors

#73040

qgis3: Failed to install

#73044

mono @6.12.0.182_1 failed on tahoe

#73045

emacs-mac-app @10.1_1+nativecomp+renameapp+treesitter not functional in Tahoe

#73094

PETSc configure failure

#73132

vault @1.19.4_0: invalid array length -delta * delta (constant -256 of type int64)

#73138

qt6-qtbase @6.10.0: fatal error: 'QtGui/private/qdbuslistener_p.h' file not found

#73140

dnstracer does not build (macOS, Xcode 26) due to getlong, getshort issues

#73166

cgal4: openscad and other ports depending on cgal4 fail to build

#73181

gcc14/mpich-gcc14 on intel mac problem

#73187

falcon @0.9.6.8: error: non-constant-expression cannot be narrowed from type 'GType' (aka 'unsigned long') to 'Falcon::int64' (aka 'long long') in initializer list [-Wc++11-narrowing]

#73206

Grass does not install on macOS Tahoe