...@Cholmondely, I will need your support. You have access to Mac devices and experience of building software there.
Personally speaking, I will be delighted to give you whatever help I can...
I'm not too sure about my supposed "experience of building of software" though! But I'm sure that Commander X has it in spades.
We'd have to start off in quite deep s***. If we try to build Oolite the way it used to be built it will all fail.
Then we have to see where compilation problems arise, and probably merge Ahruman's PR - which might still fail to build Oolite.
Then we still have to see where compilation problems arise and start modifying the code (with replacing old libraries where necessary) before we can get a build that is worth testing.
During that exercise we need to modify lots of code. It should be better if we introduce automated unit testing before touching too much - just as a safeguard.
The last attempts I made happened in a VirtualBox VM I have around. Since then, though, I migrated most of my VMs to QEMU. The migration was not an actual conversion, but mainly a re-installation of each OS. As of now, I don't have a dev environment for Mac OS X, but that can be rectified.
From what I recall, the main issue seems to be with the UI (the .xib file). The existing file has an old format, and I think that some of the information the older format dealt with is lost during import/conversion to the newer format, which leads to incorrect initialization of OpenGL.
In order to build Oolite with newer versions of Apple's toolchain, someone with more experience and dedication in development on Mac OS X/macOS should look into how the conversion should happen or just re-build the UI with the new tools.
In order to build Oolite with newer versions of Apple's toolchain, someone with more experience and dedication in development on Mac OS X/macOS should look into how the conversion should happen or just re-build the UI with the new tools.
Thank you for the feedback.
Well, unless this someone shows up we will not be able to bring back Mac builds.
Should this be the time we accept that fact and officially drop Mac support?
In order to build Oolite with newer versions of Apple's toolchain, someone with more experience and dedication in development on Mac OS X/macOS should look into how the conversion should happen or just re-build the UI with the new tools.
Thank you for the feedback.
Well, unless this someone shows up we will not be able to bring back Mac builds.
Should this be the time we accept that fact and officially drop Mac support?
Neither do we move forward in this thread nor in the GitHub issue https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite/issues/360.
I suggest we officially drop Mac support. If people scream and get active that decision can still be reverted.
