Re: [racket-users] Racket 7.5 DMG file does not open on OSX 10.11

['John Clements' via Racket Users]

> On Dec 3, 2019, at 2:29 PM, James Platt <j...@biomantica.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Nov 27, 2019, at 12:42 PM, Darth Vadør wrote:
> 
>> I am having the same problem, and I am pretty sure that this is because the 
>> new DMG uses the novel APFS format, which is not readable by our old HFS 
>> computers. 
>> As far as I know, HFS DMGs can be opened on new APFS Macs; would it be 
>> possible / a good idea to keep distributing Racket on an HFS DMG for our 
>> dinosaur machines? 
> 
> APFS has a number of new and improved features but I don't think any of them 
> are really important for a software distribution archive.  Note that macOS 
> does have zip built in.  As I understand it, the reason for dmg as the 
> official distribution format is just that it is supposed to have superior 
> integrity checking compared to zip.

It sounds to me like an easy solution to your problems would be a .tgz-bundled 
set, as e.g. we offer for Minimal Racket on the page

https://download.racket-lang.org/releases/7.5/

specifically at the link 

https://download.racket-lang.org/releases/7.5/installers/racket-minimal-7.5-x86_64-macosx.tgz

It looks to me like it would be fairly easy to generate this bundle for full 
racket, unless I’m missing something obvious. It would presumably appear on the 
“More Variants and Checksums” page along with the other tarballs. Is this 
something you’d like to see happen for the 7.6 release?

As far as the choice of .dmg for the standard distribution, it has two 
advantages that I’m aware of:
1) It allows us to create a easy installation path by specifying the way the 
disk window should look when we open it, as opposed to having an installer, and
2) It’s natively supported by Apple’s notarization workflow; I know that .tgz 
files don’t work, and I suspect that .zip files wouldn’t work either, though 
that’s just a guess.

John



> 
>> 
>> Long live 10-year-old Macs
> 
> Indeed.  The 2009 Mac Pro which I am using right now is among most likely 
> machines to be in use by the people who my company is developing software for 
> in Racket.  This Mac Pro, running El Capitan (macOS 10.11), is not just a 
> workable machine.  It's still a powerful machine by todays standards.  El 
> Capitan is the highest OS officially supported but it can run High Sierra 
> (10.13) just fine in VMWare.  Having said that, we also need to support the 
> newest machines so I will probably try setting up a VM with an even newer OS 
> or buy whatever is the cheapest laptop that can run Catalina.  For the Mac 
> Pro, I am considering installing Linux and running macOS only in virtual 
> machines.
> 
> If you want to test that the issue really is APFS then you might consider 
> installing a High Sierra (or possibly later) virtual machine.  High Sierra, 
> and up, can read APFS.
> 
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