Racket 7.5 DMG file does not open on OSX 10.11

[David Storrs]

When I download and install the .dmg file from racket-lang, I'm told "no mountable filesystems".  I'm not sure if this is an issue with how it was built, with my machine, or with OSX in general.

This may not be worth worrying about, since OSX 10.11 was released

September 30, 2015 and Apple has decided that something from four years ago is FAR too old to worry about backwards compatibility. (grumble, grumble)

[Darth Vadør]

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? 

Long live 10-year-old Macs, 

Louis

[John Clements]

This is 100% workaround rather than a fix, but have you considered using the minimal racket tarball:

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

…and then manually blessing the binaries using xattr and then installing the rest of the system manually using raco pkg install?

John

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[Bruce O'Neel]

Hi,

What would be the magic xattr command?

Thanks.

bruce

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[John Clements]

Well, actually, I would try just running the binaries, first; it may well be that 10.11 doesn’t require the manual deletion of the quarantine flags.

You can also try using a right-click and choosing “open” from the menu; this clears the quarantine flag in many cases.

If it does turn out to be necessary, the command is

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine <name-of-binary>

… IIRC. You’ll probably need to run this on (at least) two targets: the DrRacket.app directory, and the racket binary in the bin/ directory.

John

[James Platt]

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.

>
> 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.

[John Clements]

> 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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[Darth Vadør]

Hi,

If it isn't too much trouble, I at least would really appreciate this.

One reason I think this is important is because Homebrew has a cask for Racket, which uses the .dmg distribution. It sets up $PATH (and probably other things I don't know about as well), and can update Racket for you, which is quite pleasant.

If the maintainers of the cask see there is an easy way to support older Macs they might (fingers crossed) consider it.

In any case like I said I would appreciate the .tgz in itself as well!

Thanks,

Louis

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[James Platt]

On Dec 3, 2019, at 7:09 PM, John Clements wrote:

> 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.

Yes, I think tgz would be helpful. The market my company is targeting with our software has a much greater share of Mac and Linux than typical and tgz is native to both. On the other hand, would an HFS+ formatted dmg be an option? Support for that format goes all the way back to Mac OS 8.1. I know that HFS+ formatted dmg distributions supported both advantages (1 and 2 above) in the past.

[James Platt]

On Dec 6, 2019, at 9:56 PM, Darth Vadør wrote:

> If it isn't too much trouble, I at least would really appreciate this.
> One reason I think this is important is because Homebrew has a cask for Racket, which uses the .dmg distribution. It sets up $PATH (and probably other things I don't know about as well), and can update Racket for you, which is quite pleasant.
>
> If the maintainers of the cask see there is an easy way to support older Macs they might (fingers crossed) consider it.

I would also like to have an HFS+ formatted dmg as an option. However, Homebrew has dropped support for El Capitan and earlier but it continues to work (most of the time) if you already had a previous version installed. Everything after El Capitan can read APFS. So, the maintainers of the cask might decide that any new legacy support would be short lived.

[Matthew Flatt]

I’ve changed the distribution build to use HFS+ going forward.

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[David Storrs]

Thanks, Matthew,

The version on the downloads page seems to still be APFS.  Will it rebuild at some point?

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[Matthew Flatt]

At the moment, we don't have plans to rebuild v7.5, so the change would
kick in with v7.6.

The snapshot builds use HFS+ --- but they did, anyway, since they're
created with an older version of Mac OS.

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[David Storrs]

Brilliant.  Downloaded, installed, works great.  Thanks, Matthew.

[Darth Vadør]

Just installed Racket 7.6 through Homebrew.  Completely clean with no errors.

Thank you for helping us out!

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