oscar-system/oscar-website

Better install instructions for macOS ; On macOS 10.14, installing Xcode via App Store doesn't work

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The App Store only offers to install the latest Xcode version but then refuses to install it because it requires macOS 11... So yeah.

Not sure what the best fix is. Perhaps we can just point people on older macOS versions directly to the command line tools download (which we eventually got from https://developer.apple.com, but it was surprisingly difficult to find (we had to click on "Downloads", which only showed "TestFlight"... finally a super tiny "more" links at the top right lead us to it... Version Xcode 11.3.1 is the latest for macOS 10.14 Mojave.

This sucks, Apple!

At the very least we should directly link to https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ and perhaps provide a table mapping "macOS version" to "which thing do you need to download"

See https://xcodereleases.com/ which even has download links.

Perhaps xcode-select --install could be used as a general way to install command line tools? Unfortunately I can't test it very well right now, need a clean machine...

Another issue: with a fresh Xcode installation, the user may get an error indicating that they need to first agree to Apple's licensing terms by running sudo xcodebuild -license. Unfortunately they get that as part of precompilation / loading of Oscar, and so may easily overlook it.

So we probably should also cover this in the instructions (and the troubleshooting FAQ)

Actually might want to tell them to run sudo xcodebuild -license accept (but then again, this is about accepting terms of a license, so should we really tell them to blindly enter this...?)

Plan: set up a macOS VM (e.g. using VirtualBox) with a fresh macOS installation for various macOS versions (installers from https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211683 see also https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372) and then try to install the Command Line tools on these (testing whatever instructions we provide), as well as Julia and finally OSCAR.

Did it (set up a fresh VM), and the current instructions work great