On March 1st, Apple will change the rules of the Mac App Store to require all applications to run inside of a ‘sandbox’. Unfortunately, this will disallow important SourceTree functionality that was previously acceptable under store rules. Complying with the sandboxing rules would force us to change SourceTree in ways that would remove features, damage the usability of the app, and hurt our users; therefore, we will no longer submit SourceTree updates to the Mac App Store after March 1st, 2012. New updates will be available, for free, directly from sourcetreeapp.com (and via the in-app update). We will continue to monitor the situation in case Apple improve their sandboxing implementation or revise their rules. Note that we will still be signing SourceTree with our Apple developer certificate so SourceTree should work fine with the default settings of Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion when it’s released. For the full story of what forced us to take this disappointing decision, keep reading. Background From 1st March 2012, the Mac App Store will require all submitted applications to have application sandboxing enabled. Sandboxing runs the application in a controlled VM with little or no access to file, network or other resources unless they are specifically granted by the OS, which may be done by request of the application (if that’s provided), or via a privileged action dynamically granting permission, such as the Open File system dialog. The main aspects which impact SourceTree are as follows: Sandboxed applications… only have automatic file access to their ‘Container’, which is a chroot-like setup for just that single application, with local versions of the user home directory, preferences folders, and so on can only access other file locations if the user gives explicit access via an ‘Open File’ dialog, a recently-used file list, the restoration of windows in Lion, or drag/drop cannot even necessarily have knowledge of the path to the ‘real’ user home directory, only to the container version cannot send Apple events to communicate with other applications SourceTree impact Sandboxing has a significant effect on SourceTree – the sandbox was designed mainly with a simple ‘document editing’ model in mind – ie that access to files would be granted by users explicitly opening them (thus granting explicit access via a user interaction, with the open file dialog being a privileged system component which cannot be altered by the application), and that the functional process is self-contained. However, not all applications work this way, SourceTree included. Apple have notionally asked for developer feedback on this, and I and other developers have been raising ‘Radar’ issues on this for months. However, of the many issues I’ve raised since mid-2011, only a couple have been actually addressed (see the ‘Good News’ section below). The others sat in the queue for many months before finally receiving a dismissive ‘boilerplate’ response simply said ‘this is a known issue and we’re tracking it internally, please keep an eye on the release notes of future releases of OS X’. Obviously, this is not ideal. We’ve been hoping that this situation [...]
Previous Topic
