How slow is too slow for Macports selfupdate?

Question

I'm trying to selfupdate Macports on my Macbook, which is running Mavericks 10.9.5. I made sure to install Command Line Tools as described here. I then ran sudo port -v selfupdate, which was quite active for a few minutes, but has been stuck at

===> making all in src/darwintracelib1.0
/usr/bin/cc -g -O2 -std=c99 -Wextra -Wall   -fPIC -arch x86_64 -arch i386 -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I/opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs/base/src -I/opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs/base/src -I. -I/opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs/base/vendor/vendor-destroot//opt/local/libexec/macports/include  -c -o access.o access.c

for the past 24 hours. For the most part, Terminal has shown that it's running xcrun, although every now and then it flits to something else and back to xcrun. I checked Activity Monitor, and xcrun is generally taking less than 20% of my CPU. It's not making heavy use of the network. It's not thrashing, either, and it's not reading or writing to disk a whole lot.

This doesn't seem normal to me, but I've never run selfupdate before. It hasn't given me any error messages. Do I just need to be patient? If not, any suggestions on what to try next?

Edit: I've created a MacPorts Trac ticket for the issue: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/45992

Answer 1

@cfd: I had the exact same problem while doing a sudo port -d selfupdate, (-d debug mode which implies -v verbose mode) being stuck on ===> making all in src/darwintracelib1.0 for ten+ hours.

In my case, I had an older version of Xcode (and in turn the command line tools). Because I hadn't originally installed Xcode from the official Apple App Store, I was not receiving notifications that a new version was available. Once I went to the store and installed Xcode from there, the selfupdate finished in three minutes.

For clarity, I too am running OS X Version 10.9.5 and I am now up to Xcode version 6.2. However I believe I would have had the same problem regardless of OS version so hopefully this helps point someone in the right direction in the future.