macos-menubar-wireguard

there is a public outcry that they are restricting peoples freedom in installing custom applications and pushing everyone into the Appstore ecosystem. This of course doesn't excuse bad developer practices, but often it's the choice of doing things right or not being able to do them at all (never meeting your deadlines). I had the pleasure of implementing one of the suggested privilege escallation systems in a pet project[1] and it was a fun puzzle for me. But I can tell you it will be a PITA if you solve this problem under pressure as (even though Apple provides some tooling to verify everything [2]) it's really hard to figure out if all moving components are setup right for everything to work and to debug any issues. [0] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se... [1] https://github.com/aequitas/macos-menubar-wireguard/ [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/SMJob... https://github.com/brenwell/SMJobBless-Demo

is making your own pseudo state files and understanding the dependency system. One of the best features of Make is its dependency resolving. You generally write rules because you want a target (a file or directory) to be created, based on prerequisites (dependencies) according to a recipe (shell scripts). Make figures out that if the prerequisites didn't change, it doesn't need to run the recipe again and it will reuse the target. Greatly saving on build time. Because Make relies on file timestamps to do its dependency resolving magic if you don't have a file there is not much Make can do. So what you can do instead is create a pseudo target output yourself. For example: https://github.com/aequitas/macos-menubar-wireguard/blob/mas... Here a linter check is run which creates no output. So instead a hidden file .check is created as target. Whenever the sources change the target is invalidated and Make will run this recipe again updating the timestamp of .check. Also note the prerequisites behind the pipe (order-only prerequisites). These don't count toward the timestamp checking, but only need to be there. Ideal for environment dependencies, like in this case the presence of the swiftlint executable.