TortoiseHg for Apple Silicon: Current Status and Plans

[desar...@penalara.com]

Hi,

I recently asked about the future of TortoiseHg on macOS following Apple's announcement that Rosetta 2 will be removed in macOS 28.

I was pleased to learn that an ARM64 build is being worked on, and that the likely path forward is a Qt6-based version for Apple Silicon.

Just to make sure I understood the current situation correctly:

• The goal is to provide a native ARM64 build based on Qt6/PyQt6.

• A universal (Intel + ARM64) application is unlikely.

• Intel/macOS support may eventually be phased out in favor of Apple Silicon.

Is that an accurate summary?

Also, while I understand there may not be any firm dates yet, is there any rough estimate of when an ARM64 test build might become available, even in an experimental state?

Thank you for your work on TortoiseHg and for continuing to support macOS users.

[Matt Harbison]

Yes that's basically it.  There is some utility that I could use to fuse the arm64 and arm64 wheels together to make a universal build, but is anybody using Intel macs at this point?  So we'll see how that goes.

I don't really have an ETA on it.  Part of this is I'm waiting for a device at work to free up, and part is moving to Qt6 (which will have a few more bugs, though I don't see the Linux users complaining about much).

If you have a mac handy, I pushed a topic "macos-qt6-deps" with the changes needed to build a universal app (I'm fairly certain it was working back then) and a "macos-pep517" topic that may be needed with some of the recent build modernization.  I've not tried either recently.  The setup is just clone the thg repo, and in contrib/packaging/macos/src (you need to create "src"), create a symlink to the repo root named "thg".  Then clone Mercurial into contrib/packaging/macos/src with the name "hg" and checkout the desired revision.  Aside from that it's just running contrib/packaging/macos/build_py3.sh to do the build.