Quarks on Big Sur Mac OS

I’m coming back to SC after a break, trying to get the configuration back. I’m confused about Quarks and Quarks.gui.

  • there was no quarks folder in the userExtension directory
  • there was a downloaded quarks directory and Quarks.gui seemed to reporting the entries there as being installed.
  • I went to add a new quark – JITLibExtension – messaging indicated it had been installed but a) no entry appears in the download directory (as highlighted by the error thrown in Quarks.gui when I highlight it.

It has been a while since I’ve deal with this sort of problem. (Frankly, I haven’t missed it at all.) So what needs to be available on my machine to get this working properly. E.g., running git in terminal throws a long winded error from XCode indicating it can’t be found. What else?
This is MacOS 11.4
Thanks. …edN

Since posting this, I’ve gone to homebrew and got git working. But I’m still having to download the zips from GitHub, unzip, move to the downloaded folder and then do the install.
Is there something about Big Sur and its security that might be causing a problem?
Or anything else?
Thanks. …edN

Do you have XCode Command Line Tools installed?

I’m running BigSur and I don’t find myself having to do anything special to get Quarks.install or the quark GUI to work after having Git installed (which comes bundled with CLT, and/or via the homebrew method).

What do you see when you evaluate the code Quarks.folder?

Hi,
Thanks for getting back. Quarks.folder evaluates to the proper place.
XCode command line tools? At one point but I don’t think so at the moment. I did try running git in the Terminal at the beginning and there was a very verbose response from XCode essentially saying it couldn’t find it. I had hoped using homebrew might be enough but I guess I have to go the XCode route.

So this has nothing to do with the Qt problems that have cropped up? I was following the mainling list but not paying a lot of attention to most of the issues.
Thanks again. …edN

A side note: some things to check: sometimes a different git is picked up by SC and the terminal, because of different paths being in the PATH environment variable. "git --version".unixCmd should indicate which git SC uses (or indicate if there’s a problem with it).

Other things to check is whether SC has “Full disk access” in Security/Privacy settings.

Issues with SC version and BigSur should not matter for this… but to avoid other problems you should be running either 3.11.2-BigSur version (from the regular download page) or 3.12.0-rc1 (prerelease from Github).

XCode Command Line Tools are now installed. The Security modification Full Disk Access for SC has been set. But the Quarks.gui behaves as it did when I posted.
“git --version”.unixCmd generates a 4 digit integer in the Post Window.
git --version in Terminal tells me it’s 2.32.0
git --info-path returns “/usr/local/Cellar/git/2.32.0/share/info”
and
echo $PATH returns “/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Library/TeX/texbin:/opt/X11/bin”

And that, I’m afraid, exhausts knowlege about info I can generate that I think might be helpful.

I can work with Quarks manually and to be honest my time and patience are limited for fiddling with this kind of problem. It’s the sort of thing that sent me packing a year or more ago. On the other hand, if figuring out a solution might help others in future cases, I’m happy to continue with this. Please let me know what you think. And thanks again for trying to help.
…edN

I think this is it - it most likely means that SC doesn’t find git (or some other error with git). Check "which git".unixCmd which should indicate whether git is found at all.

You can compare your terminal paths with "echo $PATH".unixCmd. I’d try modifying PATH in SC to include /usr/local/bin first, so that the homebrew git is picked up, e.g. with something like "PATH".setenv("/usr/local/bin:"++"PATH".getenv); - use at your own risk :slight_smile: I’m also getting confused by PATH handling in SC.

Well, an interesting and educational afternoon.
There was an old stub and bits of XCode hanging around from 2018, an eon ago in Big Sur terms. So I did as much as I could to remove it. But of course XCode is strewn all over the machine in, say, Bitwig and Davinci Resolve and Qt!!. I don’t have the nerve to mess in there.
Earlier in the afternoon, I had removed Homebrew with the notion of letting Apple have it’s way with ‘git’ but then had second thoughts after the clean-up and re-installed it. To discover that it installs the XCode Command Line Tools – and much more quickly.

So long story short, there is a ‘git’ now running here that Supercollider sees and uses for Quarks.

Thanks again for giving me the push to deal with this. One small and kind of dumb example of the Apple saying, “It just works!” – but not in the way we expect.
…edN