MacOS installer auto uninstalls old Dynare version

The 4.6.* installer auto-uninstalls any 4.5.* versions on MacOS, I can replicate the issue a user had on the forum

Can we make this optional with a checkbox?

changed milestone to %5.x

added MacOS label

Looking at the macOS packaging stuff, I see nothing that explicitly removes older versions. I guess this is done automatically by the generated installer logic. I guess this happens whatever the version numbers, and not only between 4.5 and 4.6. Maybe there is an option to deactivate it somewhere, but I don’t know how to do that.

In any case, I am considering dropping all this installer stuff, and only distributing a zip file on macOS (at the same time as moving to cross-compilation, since tools for creating macOS packages are not available on GNU/Linux). That would de facto resolve this issue. Leaving opened for the time being.

I agree that dropping the installer would solve not only this issue but also other ones, so good idea!

added build system / packaging label

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69141400/is-there-a-way-to-prevent-osx-pkg-deleting-other-dev-versions is related. As there seems to be no easy solution, we are postponing to 4.8.

changed milestone to %6.x

unassigned @sebastien

There is a suggestion at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69141400/is-there-a-way-to-prevent-osx-pkg-deleting-other-dev-versions/71790277#71790277 We should try whether that works.

I doubt that this is the solution. Setting BundleIsRelocatable to true allows the installer to use another installation path than the one recommended by the package installer. Given that the version number is part of the installation path recommended by our installer, I hardly see how that could solve the problem.

Or maybe the problem comes from the fact that our installer uses two hierarchical levels (/Applications/Dynare/5.1/) instead of one as does MATLAB (so this would be /Applications/Dynare-5.1/).

The documentation at https://www.manpagez.com/man/1/pkgbuild/ states

Install bundle over previous version if moved by user?

That sounds like what we want to prevent.

mentioned in merge request !2149 (merged)

closed with commit 83910dda

mentioned in commit 20e15408