How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2

Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by lukeramsden on Monday December 28, 2020 @01:52PM (#25561967)

Automated testing should be done at CI stage, and you can submit a binary to Apple without having to send it live on the AppStore (TestFlight is for that), or you could send it to other beta distribution channels

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by lock-free on Monday December 28, 2020 @02:06PM (#25562110)

This works until you have a bug you can't replicate on a developer machine that your CI misses. This is a common thread on open source projects:

> issue opened October 2013

> __ is broken on MacOS

> __ should fix it but I don't have a Mac to test.

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by lloeki on Monday December 28, 2020 @03:45PM (#25563024)

An alternative version of the last step:

> I do have a Mac but ___ can’t be replicated on my specific dev-tainted environment, plus I’m using macOS Y and you use macOS Z which is a pain for me to set up a VM for, if at all possible.

The raise of a few free macOS CI mitigated that a bit but the offer is honestly poor (except at CircleCI, props to them), and seems like Apple could care less so much they’re now actively making that harder than ever.

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by lock-free on Monday December 28, 2020 @05:19PM (#25563925)

> I’m using macOS Y and you use macOS Z which is a pain for me to set up a VM for, if at all possible

If Apple should be sued for anti-consumer behavior this is why... It costs time and money to fix software with every MacOS release and I'm getting close to suggesting we add a 50% Apple tax on products to pay for the additional support it entails.

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by scarface74 on Monday December 28, 2020 @05:43PM (#25564141)

He said it was a pain. Not that it can’t be done. If you are running on a Mac, you can set up a VM for an older version of MacOS on it. It’s allowed in the EULA.

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by lloeki on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @05:51AM (#25568613)

Precisely.

As a matter of fact I went through the trouble to set up 10.9 through 10.14 in VirtualBox, driven by gitlab-runner via the virtualbox executor[0] (which is pure genius: it uses linked VM clones from a reference VM to spawn parallel runners, as well as using snapshots once SSH is ready after first boot for <2s spawn + full state reset).

Given the painful macOS on VirtualBox situation, at the time I wanted to move to VMware Fusion[1] but lacked time to implement an executor. It seems someone took that in their own hands and implemented a specific runner (in Swift!).

[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/virtualbox.html

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/1679

[2]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/1679#no...

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