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Why don't you use a virtual machine, if it is just for testing? You find a lot of tutorials on the web, how to install macOS. It is not much harder than to ins

by macco 10y ago

Why don't you use a virtual machine, if it is just for testing? You find a lot of tutorials on the web, how to install macOS. It is not much harder than to install Ubuntu.

swozey 10y ago
Yeah, sure, it's possible. It's also against their EULA and they could break it (just like Hackintoshing) at any point in time and then bam; half of your customer base is receiving untested software because you no longer have access to your virtualized OSX until you fix it (just like every time an OSX/xcode update is rolled out). Is that worth saving the $500? For most of us, it's not. Sure you can mitigate it by not doing updates, having a test machine to receive the updates and verify that it still works, yadda yadda. I managed CI infrastructures for IOS/Android developers a few years ago and the hoops we had to jump through with xcode / EULA-breaking virtualization, etc was something I'd never experienced before. Hopefully it's different now, but we used to have to run farms of mac minis because we couldn't have jenkins/bamboo trigger more than one xcode test/build run at a time. So we'd have these $1500 mac minis sitting around doing ONE job at a time whilst the Android builds could easily do 1-10 things simultaneously. Everything felt like Apple was fighting our developer experience. It was even worse for our business model as we developed 3rd party applications for other companies which brought it's own headaches with signing, testflight, getting demo/beta apps to clients before release to app store, etc.
- fizzbatter 10y ago
  > but we used to have to run farms of mac minis because we couldn't have jenkins/bamboo trigger more than one xcode test/build run at a time. As someone who is interested in OSX testing like this - ie, not arguing with you - would it be possible to have a mac mini use virtualbox with real OSX installations running in parallel? From what i've heard in this thread, Virtualbox/etc support OSX just fine, on OSX machines. Hypothetically, you could parallel-ize on a single machine via virtualbox, no? I understand Apple is still making it a PITA though. Not disagreeing, just learning why you were only running a single instance per box. :)
  - swozey 10y ago
    I last worked on this stuff 2-5 years ago so I'm not completely clear. I'm probably very wrong on this nowadays so hopefully someone can give you better info. IIRC you can run two OSX guests on an OSX host with Apple hardware. Anything that isn't using OSX as the base OS is EULA violating. I see a lot of people doing it via esxi. I'm not sure if the EULA has changed and that's ok now or people are just doing it. Thankfully I'm out of that side of CI/CD and plan to never deal with it again. Our initial goal was to have one OSX system running multiple xcode builds/tests. I think at some point we may have gotten it working by having different targets set up but I don't recall the specifics. Sorry I can't be of more help. We worked with 3-4 other app developers and it seemed like all of us were doing completely different work arounds to reach the same goal. I'd love to know how King or any of the other huge (number of apps) developers deal with these things. It doesn't seem like it's talked about much.
    - fizzbatter 10y ago
      No worries, appreciate what information you could give :)

by macco 10y ago

Why don't you use a virtual machine, if it is just for testing? You find a lot of tutorials on the web, how to install macOS. It is not much harder than to install Ubuntu.

swozey 10y ago

Yeah, sure, it's possible. It's also against their EULA and they could break it (just like Hackintoshing) at any point in time and then bam; half of your customer base is receiving untested software because you no longer have access to your virtualized OSX until you fix it (just like every time an OSX/xcode update is rolled out). Is that worth saving the $500? For most of us, it's not. Sure you can mitigate it by not doing updates, having a test machine to receive the updates and verify that it still works, yadda yadda. I managed CI infrastructures for IOS/Android developers a few years ago and the hoops we had to jump through with xcode / EULA-breaking virtualization, etc was something I'd never experienced before. Hopefully it's different now, but we used to have to run farms of mac minis because we couldn't have jenkins/bamboo trigger more than one xcode test/build run at a time. So we'd have these $1500 mac minis sitting around doing ONE job at a time whilst the Android builds could easily do 1-10 things simultaneously. Everything felt like Apple was fighting our developer experience. It was even worse for our business model as we developed 3rd party applications for other companies which brought it's own headaches with signing, testflight, getting demo/beta apps to clients before release to app store, etc.

fizzbatter 10y ago
> but we used to have to run farms of mac minis because we couldn't have jenkins/bamboo trigger more than one xcode test/build run at a time. As someone who is interested in OSX testing like this - ie, not arguing with you - would it be possible to have a mac mini use virtualbox with real OSX installations running in parallel? From what i've heard in this thread, Virtualbox/etc support OSX just fine, on OSX machines. Hypothetically, you could parallel-ize on a single machine via virtualbox, no? I understand Apple is still making it a PITA though. Not disagreeing, just learning why you were only running a single instance per box. :)
- swozey 10y ago
  I last worked on this stuff 2-5 years ago so I'm not completely clear. I'm probably very wrong on this nowadays so hopefully someone can give you better info. IIRC you can run two OSX guests on an OSX host with Apple hardware. Anything that isn't using OSX as the base OS is EULA violating. I see a lot of people doing it via esxi. I'm not sure if the EULA has changed and that's ok now or people are just doing it. Thankfully I'm out of that side of CI/CD and plan to never deal with it again. Our initial goal was to have one OSX system running multiple xcode builds/tests. I think at some point we may have gotten it working by having different targets set up but I don't recall the specifics. Sorry I can't be of more help. We worked with 3-4 other app developers and it seemed like all of us were doing completely different work arounds to reach the same goal. I'd love to know how King or any of the other huge (number of apps) developers deal with these things. It doesn't seem like it's talked about much.
  - fizzbatter 10y ago
    No worries, appreciate what information you could give :)