Signing issues on Mac OS 10.15 (Catalina)

[Ian Hinder]

(Problem description provided by Barry Wardell and reworded slightly.)

By default, only signed (and possibly at some point also notarised) applications are allowed to run on Catalina. The solution is to disable this for h5mma. There are three equivalent ways to do so:

1. Right-click on the h5mma executable and click Open, then confirm in the dialog box that appears.
2. Run 'spctl --add MacOSX-x86-64/h5mma' from the command line.
3. Try and fail to open h5mma, then go to System Preferences, select the “Security & Privacy” control panel, go to the “General” tab, then under the “Allow apps downloaded from:” look for the following message: “h5mma was blocked from opening because it is not from an identified developer.”, then click the "Open Anyway" button next to it.

We should update the installation instructions to explain this. In the longer term, we may wish to distribute a signed and notarised version of the application, but this requires an Apple Developer Account, which costs $99/year.

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[Ian Hinder]

Do we know anyone with a developer account who could join the project and do this? How are other open source projects handling this?