Installer black window on Apple Silicon, Ventura

[Adreitz]

I have an old Ambrosia version of Aquaria. I found this updater hopeful that I could get it running on my new M2 Max MBP running 13.2.1, but unfortunately, the installer only shows a black window with a Start Updating button. I can't see how to point the installer to the Aquaria package and clicking on the button simply produces a small black second window titled Application Error with three buttons. It would be great if you could get this working on new Macs. Thanks!

[fgenesis]

Thanks for reporting, i remember i saw this on another machine and thought it was a fluke. Now it's obvious it's not :< -- just checked, it's a known problem with Tcl/Tk on M1 machines.

You can try to copy things around manually, but there's a reason i wrote this thing for osx.
(finder is a complete piece of shit that fails simple tasks like merging directories)

Will see what can be done.

[fgenesis]

Actually i remember working around this (ie. got it to work on the machine i've tried back then) somehow but the details are gone; been a while.

iirc when you click anything in the titlebar it should display normally while a menu is open, but i can't recall an application error.

[Adreitz]

Thanks for checking! I believe I opened menus to try to see if I could do anything and I don't remember that triggering the window contents to become visible. But I'll try again the next time I have some free time.

[Edit] I just saw the discussion here: https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/52b2d8c4eb57f350076826d990a33b1bc8e4ada283d22308498d30c8556be26f. I have MacPorts installed. Do you think installing a newer version of tk using "sudo port install tk +quartz" would help, or would your app still be bound to the built-in version? [/Edit]

[fgenesis]

Do you think installing a newer version of tk using "sudo port install tk +quartz" would help

No idea. If it replaces or somehow overrides the system version then that would help.

But it's no option for most people so it looks like a new updater is in order (or if possible, a fix to the current one, but i sure dunno right now)

Any idea what would be a good choice for windowing framework on newer osx? Needs to be used via a scripting language that's installed on the system by default.

The reason is that i'd like the installer to run on all things osx no matter what, that means:

• on < 10.7 or so only Tcl/Tk is available, and the updater has some hacks to even work on 10.5. Haven't tested anything less.
• Slightly newer osx versions may or may not have python 2.x
• Very new versions have definitely kicked python 2.x and may or may not have python 3.x preinstalled.
• Python's gui libs use Tk, so that would not even fix the bug
• Maybe python has a GTK wrapper or something osx-specific?

And shipping a compiled binary is right out because of signature checking, that's why it must be a script run by a system interpreter. Sucks, but it's apple, so what can you do. Stay away from it is all i can say.

EDIT: Actually, you could run the install script with your custom built version, sure. The initial launcher is just a shell script that select the system interpreter, so it's easy to interject there.

EDIT2: The updater has its own repo: https://github.com/AquariaOSE/updater so in case you figure something out before i do please make a PR there!

[Adreitz]

I'm afraid I'm not a coder. I just know my way around Terminal and can Google search. Windowing systems are outside my expertise. I assume you need something cross-platform, but does it need to run in Python? A quick Google search brought me here, and I know I've seen app packages that use this before, but don't know if it will help you: https://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platforms/macos/. As far as I know, the code necessary to run it is included in the app package, so there is no need to preinstall. There is also this Quora thread: https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-Python-GUI-framework-for-a-Mac-OS-X.

[Adreitz]

Am I interpreting the updater repo correctly that it is essentially just a .sh script and a .tcl script? I couldn't immediately tell which one handled the meat of the updating and which was just creating the windows. If it can be done with one or two Terminal commands, I think many Mac users would be okay with just running the script directly without the need for a GUI. Unless you're using some special feature of tclsh, you could rewrite the script for bash/zsh and be up to date with modern MacOS. But, again, I only cobbled together one bash script once and don't appreciate how difficult porting would be.