Topic: Notice for people compiling Armory on macOS (Read 149 times)

Hey everyone. FYI, if you're somebody who compiles Armory on Macs, you should try to avoid installing macOS 10.14 (Mojave) for now. Long story short, compiling Qt 4 currently fails. As best I can tell, this is due to Qt 4 compiling some code in 32-bit mode. This is deprecated in 10.14, with support for running 32-bit code planned to be removed in 10.15. I noticed this in the 10.14 betas but was hoping there might be some sort of "out" by the time it was eventually released. No dice. Note that this does not affect armoryd (Python script) or the ArmoryDB binary (command-line binary that doesn't use Qt), although building the latter in a standalone manner on macOS isn't supported by the current build scripts.

If you've already upgraded, you'll need to install a VM or find a way to roll back to 10.13. It might be possible to use a pre-10.14 SDK to get around this too but I haven't researched it yet. That and it may not be easy to redistribute a trustworthy SDK; to be 100% above board, you may have to roll your own SDK. (It's annoying but doable. Core already requires it for cross-platform compilation of Mac builds.)

I don't know when this will be fixed. My original plan was to roll out a new build system once Armory is upgraded to Python 3 and Qt 5. The person who was going to work on it is busy at the moment, and I'm busy working on other things. I do have a work-in-progress PR but it leans on the aforementioned Py3/Qt5 upgrade, alongside other PRs. I haven't decided yet if it's worthwhile to try to shoehorn in a solution for the current setup. I think it's much easier now that Armory uses Autotools. I just haven't finished investigating.

In any event, if you just run Armory, you're good for now. This may change in 1-2 years but, one way or another, this will be fixed.

Thanks for your patience!

tl;dr - As is, Armory won't compile on MacOS 10.14 (Mojave). This does not affect people running Armory. For now, Armory will happily run on 10.14, although a future version of MacOS (10.15, most likely) will probably require an upgrade to Armory.