Hi Sam, On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 2:50 AM, Webb, Samuel M. wrote:

Hi all -

I've run into a lot of problems with Mac installs in general with my compiled XAS programs as well, particularly with the latest High Sierra update. It's been pointed out to me by a few users that another potential work around is to use Wine 3.0 https://www.winehq.org as an emulator of sorts (and its free) to run a windows program within the MacOS environment. It's smaller and more compact than say Parallels or VMware as it doesn't do the whole operating system, hence the free part. Its seems easy to install, and also makes for one less OS to maintain a distribution for. It may not be the most elegant solution, but it could work for some... I may end up using this for myself rather than maintaining a native Mac distribution in the future. Sam

Thanks -- that's an interesting idea. I certainly like the idea of combining Sixpack and Wine, though do we need XAS for that ;). I hadn't thought about Wine in many years, and didn't realize it supported macOS. But I just tried installing wine on high Sierra, and then Demeter and Sixpack. I was able to run Sixpack, though with "wine sixpack.exe" from the command line interface from a "Open Wine Stable". It seemed like it was working (read in some data, and plotted it anyway). Trying to install and run the windows version of demeter did *not* work for me. It seems that wine could not run the version of perl installed for Demeter, though the error messages were very cryptic and I have not looked into it any deeper. That said, I haven't had any problems with Python on high Sierra, though I'm using Anaconda Python and wxPython, and happily marching to Python3.6. Larch does install and run with an shell-script installer, and this does create small desktop Apps that run the various GUI programs. To circumvent Apple's "trusted app provider" thing, these Apps are built with a script ("larch_makeicons") that is run after installation (and so run **by the user** from Apple's point of view). That way I don't have to mess around with py2exe or PyApp (which seem to require continual fiddling), but only with the conda packages, which seems like much less fiddling to me. Of course, I would love to incorporate as much of Sixpack into Larch as possible. The XAS Viewer app is not fully-featured yet, but it is progressing. --Matt