Hi Joel,
I ran into the problem that some people seem to have with Demeter on mac while upgrading to High Sierra. I found a fix on this mail list, but…
Yeah, Demeter on MacOS is a continuing challenge. Even when it can be installed, parts of the GUI interaction are pretty buggy (I believe this must be due to wxPerl on Mac). MacPorts seems to need a fair amount of attention and expects the end user to know Unix command line tools well enough to be able to run updates and understand and react to error messages. For sure, it is a useful resource for developers, but it seems like it is not really designed for deploying end-user software. Still , I don't know of a better alternative for getting Demeter working on MacOS. I've tried many of the alternatives, and wxPerl seems to be a real stumbling block for all of them.
1) I can’t download Template.pm from the archive (bin file that uncompresses to cpgz file that uncompresses back to a bin file…)
I think that the advice from Luke and Bruce back in April was to try to find and install version 1.47 of Text::Template. You might find this at https://metacpan.org/source/MSCHOUT/Text-Template-1.47/lib/Text and try unpacking and installing that. There may be a way to specify particular versions with the "cpan" program, but I do not know how to do it. I don't think we want "install old version of some library" to be a long term solution (this will break other things eventually), but it might work for you.
2) Matt mentions that he installed 0.9.26 from macports, but I see only 0.9.25 (stable & develop).
To clarify, in April I updated MacPorts to the latest versions, installed the packages for Demeter 0.9.25. Then I installed Demeter 0.9.26 from source code on top of that. That might also work , but it's probably more work than most folks would want to do. Cheers, --Matt