I would not expect a lot of program incompatibility issues from APFS, aside 
from with third-party filesystem related utilities and perhaps backup utilities 
- although IIRC, one cannot share APFS filesystems using AFP (which is 
deprecated anyway), but only with SMB or NFS; and APFS doesn't yet support 
Fusion drives (it did at one point, but that was disabled presumably pending 
more work on that, and it's expected to again in the future).

However, sites like arstechnica.com 
<https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/macos-10-13-high-sierra-the-ars-technica-review/>
  (usually some pretty sharp macOS reviews there) have said that although it 
should be fine for most people, if you don't really need to update right away, 
you might want to hold off for .1 or .2.  "Recommendations: Look before you 
leap 
<https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/macos-10-13-high-sierra-the-ars-technica-review/9/#h7>."
  It takes awhile for a new filesystem to become proven, and if there's going 
to be data loss, you might prefer that it happens to someone else.  APFS has 
been tested reasonably well IMO, and an early version was in Sierra (although 
not usable there as a boot volume); so it's certainly not as if they're rushing 
it, but a .0 of anything tends to be slightly higher in risk or problems.  If 
you're supporting others, you want to take those problems on before you update 
their systems so you won't have angry users and extra phone calls; but 
otherwise, let others suffer first, unless you're well able to cope, and have 
the time to spare. :-)

To some extent, that also goes for the possible impact on any other third-party 
software, including non-vendor-supported open source; although with the latter, 
people do have to participate a little or it won't get better.

I tend to like to update most things fairly early; but I also use sites like 
https://roaringapps.com/apps <https://roaringapps.com/apps> to see what people 
have been saying about app compatibility, follow macrumors.com 
<http://macrumors.com/> and arstechnica.com <http://arstechnica.com/>, etc, so 
that I at least have an idea what I'm getting myself into.  And I don't 
actually need whatever system I'm updating to be working great right away, but 
I'd prefer not to have to spend more than a couple of days ironing out most of 
the issues.  I'm in no rush to update this time though, just to be safe.  And 
the first system I'd update (my laptop, which is the one I use most directly 
most of the time), has good backups.

In some future OS update one or more years from now, 32-bit app support will 
probably get dropped, at which time, a bunch of no longer maintained apps will 
stop working.  That happened on iDevices with iOS 11.  Cleaning those out may 
be wise anyway, if they're not essential, since they haven't had security and 
other fixes for awhile.  But it's disruptive, and sometimes expensive; even if 
sooner or later, inevitable.


> On Sep 29, 2017, at 21:22, Ryan Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sep 29, 2017, at 15:05, Merton Campbell Crockett wrote:
> 
>> I’ve just installed a new 27” iMac with Retina 5K display to replace a 
>> failed Mac Pro.  I vaguely recall seeing a mention of potential issues with 
>> macOS High Sierra and Xquartz and MacPorts.  Is this related to Apple’s new 
>> AFPS file system architecture?
>> 
>> I had planned to download and install macOS High Sierra this weekend.  
>> Should I hold off downloading it?
> 
> One person mentioned a problem with Xquartz on Sierra, which was resolved by 
> reinstalling Xquartz.
> 
> https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/2017-September/043755.html
> 
> I mentioned that since High Sierra is new, at this time you may expect to 
> encounter more issues with MacPorts software on High Sierra than you would on 
> Sierra. You'll also have to build more ports from source, since we have not 
> yet built all ports for High Sierra on our build server. We also haven't made 
> a binary installer of MacPorts for High Sierra yet, so you'll have to build 
> MacPorts itself from source.
> 
> https://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/2017-September/043743.html
> 

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