Modelonia and Yosemite

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Hi Liqih,

Yesterday I bought a new mac, with Yosemite installed. Today I'm going through installing/authenticating the dozens of plugins I use regularly (it will probably take the whole weekend to be honest) and Modelonia is the first to have a problem.

See the image - the installer thinks I'm running a pre-10.3.9 OS so doesn't offer a target drive.

Do you have any plans to make Modelonia 10.9 compatible?

Many thanks,
CB
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The same problem also exists for Broken Drum Machine.

Sorry for the bad news.
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Ah, we've been seeing issues like that at work. Comes down to the fact that noone was expecting a v10.10 of OSX, so version comparison strings in installers are failing because .10 is 'less than '.2' alphabetically.

It might be possible to unpack the dmg file and see if there's an installer script that could be modified. But it might just be easiest to manually install stuff, if you can work out where it is on a non-Yosemite machine.
my other modular synth is a bugbrand
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whyterabbyt wrote:Ah, we've been seeing issues like that at work. Comes down to the fact that noone was expecting a v10.10 of OSX, so version comparison strings in installers are failing because .10 is 'less than '.2' alphabetically.
Well this is interesting. Apple provides the installer app (it's a system component) and the installer packages are generally just the data, so you'd think they'd be able to get a version check correct. Though someone putting together an installer package can script in additional checks, and I'd imagine you are right and some packagers may do those checks incorrectly.

I don't have the Modelonia and BDM installers, but I do have the BDM demo installer. Now this may be a red herring, but the demo installer appears to use a legacy mechanism for doing installation requirements checks: the IFRequirementDicts entry in the installer package's Info.plist. Apple no longer documents this; I think they abandoned it a long time ago. Here's the one from the BDM demo installer:

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	<key>IFRequirementDicts</key>
	<array>
		<dict>
			<key>LabelKey</key>
			<string>OSX 10.4 or better</string>
			<key>Level</key>
			<string>requires</string>
			<key>MessageKey</key>
			<string>messagekey0</string>
			<key>SpecArgument</key>
			<string>sysv</string>
			<key>SpecType</key>
			<string>gestalt</string>
			<key>TestObject</key>
			<string>4160</string>
			<key>TestOperator</key>
			<string>>=</string>
			<key>TitleKey</key>
			<string>titlekey0</string>
		</dict>
	</array>
Now gestalt is deprecated and a bit of googling reveals that using the sysv argument is problematic. So maybe something like that is the problem in the Modelonia and BDM installers. But like I say, this could be a red herring because that BDM demo installer doesn't appear to complain in my Yosemite preview VM (no, I haven't upgraded to the final Yosemite yet), so the actual installers are likely doing something different.
whyterabbyt wrote:It might be possible to unpack the dmg file and see if there's an installer script that could be modified. But it might just be easiest to manually install stuff, if you can work out where it is on a non-Yosemite machine.
I'd be interested in seeing what installer metadata and scripts are lurking in those problematic installers. So mount the disk images, grab in particular the Info.plist file that will be lurking in the Contents folder of the .mpkg bundle and post it here. You'll need to either Show Package Contents in the finder, or poke around using Terminal.app. But you may just be able to get away with showing the package contents of the metapackage (the .mpkg bundle) and then running the separate .pkg installers that are likely to be under Contents/Resources if the Modelonia and BDM installer packages are structured anything like the DBM demo package.
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blurk I would send you a Modelonia and BDM installers to see if it's possible to simply extract the plugin files and do a manual install, makes sense?

Thanks all of you,
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liqih wrote:blurk I would send you a Modelonia and BDM installers to see if it's possible to simply extract the plugin files and do a manual install, makes sense
Sure, I'm happy to do that. Just so everyone knows, though, it might take me a little while to look at it because I have some family caring to do here too, plus some hardware failures to deal with. But I do expect to find a spare moment here and there to look at this.
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blurk wrote:
liqih wrote:blurk I would send you a Modelonia and BDM installers to see if it's possible to simply extract the plugin files and do a manual install, makes sense
Sure, I'm happy to do that. Just so everyone knows, though, it might take me a little while to look at it because I have some family caring to do here too, plus some hardware failures to deal with. But I do expect to find a spare moment here and there to look at this.
Very good, thanks so much Bernie, you have the links now, so let me know when you'll find the time
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liqih wrote:Very good, thanks so much Bernie, you have the links now, so let me know when you'll find the time
Got them, thanks.

Initial test results are that I get the same failure when installing Modelonia but BDM full installs fine after installing BDM demo, which also installs fine. Now, I haven't upgraded properly to Yosemite yet so I'm doing all this testing in a Yosemite preview virtual machine.

The Modelonia installer checks the OS version in a different way to the BDM installers (whyterabbyt was quite correct: that seems to use a straight string compare of the version strings). I have removed the OS version checks from all three installers, and successfully installed them all in the Yosemite virtual machine. I've also double-checked the modified installers on Mavericks and tested the plugins there: all working. So, with the modified installers, there is no need to do a manual install.

I've sent the updated installers to liqih but if you want to try this at home you need to find within the Modelonia installer a file named distribution.dist and remove lines 5 to 15 (the volume-check and script XML elements). Yes, if you get this wrong you could trash your installer so be warned and keep a copy of the original. Here's one I prepared earlier:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<installer-script minSpecVersion="1.000000" authoringTool="com.apple.PackageMaker" authoringToolVersion="3.0.2" authoringToolBuild="174">
    <title>Modelonia</title>
    <options customize="allow" allow-external-scripts="no" rootVolumeOnly="true"/>
    <background file="background" alignment="bottomleft" scaling="none"/>
    <readme file="ReadMe"/>
    <license file="License"/>
    <choices-outline>
        <line choice="choice5"/>
    </choices-outline>
    <choice id="choice5" title="Modelonia Plugin Pack">
        <pkg-ref id="com.nusofting.modelonia.modelonia.modeloniaPluginPack.pkg"/>
    </choice>
    <pkg-ref id="com.nusofting.modelonia.modelonia.modeloniaPluginPack.pkg" installKBytes="15616" version="1.707" auth="Root">file:./Contents/Packages/modeloniaPluginPack.pkg</pkg-ref>
</installer-script>
The instructions are a bit trickier for BDM, but it installed fine for me so maybe you won't need them or can just wait for liqih to make the updated installers available.
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Hi all,

ok so I have here the new installers compatible with Yosemite, thanks to blurk!

But I haven't uploaded them yet, so far if you, someone, needs a Modelonia or BDM instaler for Yosemite OS X please ask,

note both Modelonia and BDM are 32-bit AU and VST, to use them in a 64-bit host you need an adapter, also called bridge.
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