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