Thomas Much's Weblog

Xcode 2.2 killed my system ...

Just a little warning if you intend to update your Xcode 2.1 to version 2.2. On my iMac G5 (rev. B) it killed my startup volume...

I had Mac OS X 10.4.3 running on that machine, all software updates applied, the startup volume was verified successfully and the permissions had been repaired. I did a complete Xcode install (all options selected) over a complete installation. All was working well until the installer reached the Java documentation postflight script... I got a lot of "mismatch in rm pattern" messages (unfortunately, I did not save the install log), and after a very long time the installer finished.

Now the kernel_task (pid 0) was hogging memory... When it reached 1.5 GB (out of 2 GB physical memory), I tried to shutdown the system (did not work, I had to do a forced shutdown). Afterwards, I could not boot any more into Mac OS X... Which was quite understandable, since half of my System folder was deleted, and many bundles in the Applications directory had some of their resources deleted, too. Unfortunately, I could not reinstall Mac OS X with "Archive & Install", as my startup volume was corrupted now and could not be repaired. I suspected some hardware error, but Apple Hardware Test reports everthing as ok (knock on wood... I do not need two dead Macs, see my next posting...).

So, take this as a warning to make backups on a regular basis (I'm glad I did). And before installing Xcode 2.2, you might want to uninstall the previous version first. As my iMac hardware works ok, I still suspect a software bug in the Java documentation postflight script - even after a completely new reinstall of Mac OS X 10.4.3 and Xcode 2.2 I get some strange errors from the script (yes, this time I saved it ;-):

run postflight script for Java 1.4 Reference Documentation
postflight[641]: /bin/mkdir -p "//System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.4.2/Resources/Documentation/Reference"
postflight[641]:
postflight[641]: rmdir: //Developer/ADC Reference Library/documentation/Java/Reference/1.4.2: Directory not empty
postflight[641]:
postflight[641]: PSSniffer error: Not a directory
postflight[641]:
postflight[641]: ***** Errors found during indexing. *****
postflight[641]: Rerun pbhelpindexer with the '-d' debug switch for a complete transcript of the errors and associated files.
postflight[641]:
postflight[641]:
run postflight script for Developer Documentation
postflight[670]: mv: rename //Developer/ADC Reference Library/documentation/Java/Reference/1.4.2/appledoc/api/dummy.html to //Developer/ADC Reference Library/documentation/Java/Reference/1.4.2/appledoc/api/index.html: No such file or directory
postflight[670]: