Dear Matt,
Many thanks for opining on Mac installations of x-ray code. Much more, many thanks for building a really nice suite of useful tools for x-ray physics. (Congratulations on the new major version of Larch!)
I am the official MacPorts “maintainer” of Ifeffit and the Demeter suite and have been for roughly a decade. For several years, I was able to keep the port alive, albeit barely. For roughly the last 4-5 years, I have been unsuccessful building Ifeffit under the MacPorts project; without it, Demeter can’t be used.
Given that the package is unmaintained and pulled from GitHub, I will plan to work with MacPorts to remove the demeter and ifeffit packages, or mark them as permanently moribund, or whatever they favor. Perhaps that will help clarify for people that installing these tools on Macs is no longer possible in 2025.
Hi Kyle, Yep, it has been well-established that trying to build and run Demeter on macOS is very hard, and the results will be fragile. If you got advice in the past 5 years that was something other than "don't bother", then I would
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Best wishes,
Joe Fowler
NIST Quantum Sensors Division, Boulder Colorado
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From: Matthew Newville on behalf of Matt Newville
Date: Wednesday, August 6, 2025 at 2:56 PM
To: XAFS Analysis using Ifeffit
Cc: Kluherz, Tk
Subject: [Ifeffit] Re: Help installing Demeter on a Mac
Hi Kyle,
Yep, it has been well-established that trying to build and run Demeter on macOS is very hard, and the results will be fragile. If you got advice in the past 5 years that was something other than "don't bother", then I would say you were misled.
Larch installs without any trouble, and Larix runs just fine on macOS. Yep, there are a few things that Larix does not do that Demeter does, and there are many things that Larix does that Demeter does not. Larch and Larix are actively developed. If some feature is not working well for you, we have plenty of mechanisms for asking for help, getting feedback, and contributing. There have been 5 releases of Larch in the past 12 months.
Most installations of Demeter use only the Fortran Ifeffit library. This has not been supported for more than 10 years. It has many known bugs that will not ever be fixed. I recently removed the repository from GitHub, as some people were still trying to use and build that code. This needs to stop.
These are open-source software, written by volunteers. You are free to use any version or modification of these you want – that is one of the points of open-source software. But you cannot expect support for very old software, especially when the developers are clearly stating that it is not supported.
Please stop asking about installing Demeter on macOS. It is not going to be supported.
--Matt
