New Installer Package for macOS

Dev
21

This is what I see with make dist on the Mac: it fails attempting to add gvedit because there is no QMAKE, so the command to create the qMakefile is blank. Can the command itself be moved to the part of the build on the deployment host or installation?

QT_SELECT=5 -o qMakefile gvedit.pro

I tried configuring --without-qt --without-gvedit. Regardless, the make dist fails with this output from cmd/gvedit/Makefile:

 (cd gvedit && /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/make  top_distdir=../../graphviz-10.0.0~dev.20231103.0952 distdir=../../graphviz-10.0.0~dev.20231103.0952/cmd/gvedit am__remove_distdir=: am__skip_length_check=: am__skip_mode_fix=: distdir)

I can run the failing command directly to illustrate:

make distdir-am
QT_SELECT=5 -o qMakefile gvedit.pro
/bin/sh: -o: command not found
make[6]: *** [qMakefile] Error 127
make[5]: *** [distdir] Error 2
make[4]: *** [distdir-am] Error 1
make[3]: *** [distdir] Error 2
make[2]: *** [distdir-am] Error 1
make[1]: *** [distdir] Error 2
make: *** [dist] Error 2
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I have submitted a merge request (as user Elaeagnus) to create a macOS installer package:

23

To summarize, the situation today is that the arm64 installer package is built in CI. See, for example, this recent pipeline log file.

It’s not ready for distribution for general use. One show stopper and several other things noted:

  1. The package is not signed, so it can’t be installed without a lot of intentional awkwardness. Apparently signing involves paying Apple $100/year for a developer certificate, and running an additional command in the pipeline to submit the package to Apple for notarization. Apple only grants “free” licenses to projects represented by a nonprofit or charitable legal corporation. Graphviz does not have one or belong to one.

  2. It’s not good, though apparently benign, that there are a lot of messages saying dyld_info: unknown option: -linked_dylibs in the MacOS build log. Anyone could try to fix this.

  3. The install packages have names like Darwin_23.6.0_graphviz-15.0.1~dev.20260530.0911-arm64.pkg that should probably be simplified.

Because apparently people are generally satisfied to install through Homebrew or Macports, I’m only making these comments for the public record.