I ported pacman to OS X more than 10 years ago. I’ve been handling it by myself for my own usage since then as Arch OS X, then ArchMac. I had a couple of Darwin

I ported pacman to OS X more than 10 years ago. I’ve been handling it by myself for my own usage since then as Arch OS X, then ArchMac. I had a couple of Darwin specific patches, and I started ramping up to build stuff on Catalina first since that’s current and what free CI for FOSS are moving to. It feels like I’m close to a release compatible with Catalina but I keep on hitting strange weird bugs that did not happen when building on previous macOS versions, and keep having to work around stuff. What was a stable enough platform is now a significant pain even for trivial stuff. The last one is an obscure bug where a file existence test seems to return bogus results (there is no file in the package cache dir, yet pacman does not go through the download step when such a file is missing, and fails with a NULL pointer assertion as the later state is inconsistent. Same source code works with flying colors when built on a previous darwin). With some time I could probably add yet another patch to fix that, but I’m left wondering if it’s really worth it now, as if the trend continues as it did for the last three versions darwin20 will be even more painful to support, if at all. ArchMac is not the only one impacted, e.g - nix found a workaround to install on /nix but it’s a pain involving APFS volumes and synthetic.conf - homebrew relies on ruby which will be removed in a future version - with the impending Damocles sword of notarized binaries it will be a serious pain to do package management And that’s just the most structural ones. Death by a thousand cuts isn’t far off. The X of Mac OS X has been dropped for some time now for branding reasons, but reality seems to come to terms with that symbolic move.