So my victory of getting Rawtherapee on the computer labs has been asterisked by some very serious bugs running version 5.7 on their macs running MacOS High Sierra (10.13).
I reported one of them on Github , and one of the responses, and other info found on the web I sent the following email to a tech admin.
My recommendation is to try mac installation of other versions of RTawtherapee. Note that it is instructed by developers to install Rawtherapee to /Applications folder in Mac, and not to the root directory (I saw the Rawtherapee install in HH245 in the root directory, so I thought I’d include this as a reminder for the future.)
Try first Rawtherapee version 5.6
Then try, v 5.5 and preceding down to v5.1 or so.
Another option is to compile it for Mac from scratch, having the advantage of getting the latest code (a lot of recent work for mac issues was done in the last few days). Documentation can be had here http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/MacOS#Compile_RawTherapee .
If none of these work, I’d recommend installing Rawtherapee on a Windows computer lab instead (I always had strong and snappy results running Rawtherapee on modern Windows 10 PCs, even running the portable version works fine). A lot of work was recently done trying to make RT work on Mac, in the last few days, so maybe once v 5.8 comes out for Mac, it could have stability greatly improved and would be worth a second go at that point.
The rest of the email contained supplemental information about the bug issues, a sample can be found at this Github bug report.
Note that due to campus wide tech policy, upgrading the Mac operating system is not an option, though an upgrade to MacOS Mojave (10.14) will occur this summer. Also note that this email was sent before the mac version release of v 5.8, and I will send them an update with highest bet being 5.6 and 5.8 being the best versions.
Also, a fair warning, that any new installs will take a few days (weeks?) to be implemented, as I have to go through the bureaucracy to get the change implemented, though I might see if I can get involved with the hardware team that actually executes implementation, so we can try a bunch more on one session. I will also look into seeing if I can borrow a friends mac running High Sierra for admin access, but that’s an unknown at this point. Otherwise, I will just solicit advice now, try to implement, wait for the thread to collect dust until the implementation happens, and then make an update.
So was my advice on point? Does anyone have any further suggestions on what to try installing?
Developement builds that I may not be aware of?
Note I am willing to do more bug hunting and reporting on the current install on the computer lab macs, but I had some hesitations, and I created a separate thread for the discussion of whether that would be useful, as doing both conversations on one thread would be a convoluted eyesore.
Edit: Slow timescale warning paragraph