Crashes when doing normal tasks (download macOS installer, save workflow to disk image, etc.)

[Nicholas Hubbard]

After upgrading my device to Monterey 12.3, MDS keeps randomly crashing whenever I try to download a macOS installer, save a workflow, or do really anything else. I’ve attached the stack trace as a text file. I’ve tested this on both an Intel machine and a newer Apple silicon machine, and both produce an almost identical stack trace.

[Nicholas Hubbard]

I have a theory related to this, but I can’t confirm that it’s correct without the maintainers:

macOS Monterey 12.3 removed Python 2.7 in its entirety. The only Python script in the codebase is triggered by saving a workflow, and it’s called installinstallmacos.py. It’s clearly written with Python 2.7 in mind, and while it’s been migrated to be partially used with Python 3, it’s probably the reason why the workflow creation fails.

I’m pretty sure that it also has a hand in downloading the macOS installer.

There’s one problem, though: I can’t test the script myself. I tried to clone the repository and build it from source to fix the bug, but multiple components are not able to be fetched from Bitbucket, and several headers and libraries are proprietary. Carthage gets stuck in an infinite loop attempting to clone many of the dependencies from other TwoCanoes Bitbucket repositories. As such, I believe that MDS is actually a source-available project, not fully open source, since the general public can’t build the project or fix bugs.

[Gerald Mcdonald]

Try downloading the latest 4.3 build from Downloads. In February installinstallmacos was replaced with mist for OS installer download functionality (it’s based on Swift instead of Python).