Q

Do you intend to support macOS 10.15 Catalina?

A

Yes but don't be surprised if you feel harassed by macOS Catalina when using Packages (or any other 3rd party application).

Notarization

• If you sign your distributions or flat packages with productsign, you can notarize them.

• If you sign your distributions or flat packages from within Packages, you will need to use version 1.2.7 to be able to notarize them.

IMPORTANT

At the time of this writing, I don't have any plan to notarize the Packages application itself (or its installation package, or its disk image). I despise the fact that it's now required to pay $99 each year to distribute even freeware on the macOS platform. I'm fine about paying $99 every 5 years to get Developer ID certificates. I am not about paying that amount each year for no good reasons. To install Packages on a macOS Catalina system, you will need to follow longer instructions than on previous macOS versions. Check the "Read Before You Install Packages" document at the root of the disk image.

Full Disk Access

• Depending on where your project files, payload assets, presentation documents, scripts are located, you may need to allow Full Disk Access to Packages:

  Applications and binaries to grant Full Disk Access:

  • /Applications/Packages.app
  • /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/fr.whitebox.packages/packages_builder
  • /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/fr.whitebox.packages/packages_dispatcher

  If you use the packagesbuild command line too, you may need to grant Full Disk Access to it too.

  • /usr/local/bin/packagesbuild

Catavista Privacy Alerts

If you don't grant Full Disk Access to /Applications/Packages.app, you may see alerts about Packages trying to access your Calendar, Photos, AddressBook.

• Packages only queries the AddressBook framework to guess the domain name for your e-mail address in order to create a default identifier prefix for your packages. You can prevent Packages from accessing your Address Book, this does prevent Packages from working correctly.

• The other alerts are either caused by you visiting these folders through the standard open or save panel. There is also a bug in macOS that can trigger such an alert.

You may see an awkward system notification asking you whether you allow Packages to use system notifications or not.

• Packages can indeed using system notifications to notify you about the result of a build. You can disable or enable this in the Preferences > Building pane of Packages.

• You can either prevent Packages from posting system notifications or just change Packages preferences settings; this will not prevent the application from working correctly.