Stack Installer is a small app that used to ship with Stacks 1.0 and Stacks 2.0 to help install stacks. In those days RapidWeaver did not know how to.
Unfortunately the Stack Installer app will only do harm now. It does not know about any of the new locations where Stacks need to go and will only confuse your system.
You should make sure you have one and only one thing that knows about Stacks: RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver MUST be installed in your Applications folder and its best if there is only one version of RapidWeaver there.
I have found that without stackinstaller, stack packets do not appear under Mojave. I have completely stripped all RW and Stacks from mu machine, and reinstalled the latest and gratest clean versions of RW 8.1.7 and Stacks 3.
I get the same results.
Stack packets disappear, and directory folders take their place.
When I run stacksinstaller, the packets magically reappear, and they can be loaded into RW 8.1.7.
@notimeflat - i suspect your Finder is very confused as to what app âownsâ a .stack file.
I really really really insist that you discontinue using the old Stack Installer application. It is very old now and will only cause more problems. It will attempt to own .stack files â but will not know what to do with them because the location of the RapidWeaver add-on directory has moved (more than once) since the last time Stack Installer was updated (i think something like 7 years ago!!!).
Unfortunately when you install/uninstall/reinstall applications it can take the Finder a while to catch up and figure out that a new application needs to take over. There is no documented way to tell the finder to refresh that information â but usually a reboot will cause the Finder to re-index.
That said, it is not essential that the files âlook likeâ stacks. Even if they look like folders, so long as theyâre in the right spot (see my post above for how to find the right spot) they should work just fine.
If you have only RapidWeaver installed. And the Stack Installer app is completely deleted from your system, then eventually the Finder will catch up and recognize that a .stack file should be associated with the RapidWeaver app â and it will give it the correct icon.
If that doesnât happen after youâve rebooted and given your Mac 24 hours to re-index â then there is likely something more seriously wrong with your file system than anyone here on the forums can help with. At that point itâs time for a visit to an Apple Store for help â or (what Iâd probably do) a clean reinstall of the Mojave.
One more thing: This has only happened once that I know of, but a user a few years back reported their stacks not installing correctly. After many support emails to pinpoint the problem eventually we found that the stack files themselves were very corrupted: missing parts, mangled parts, etc.
Eventually we found the culprit: the user was using a âfast downloadâ utility that also decompressed zip files. However it didnât do a very good job of it. LOL
So, I mention just in case, make sure youâre doing things in the most plain-vanilla way possible.
Use Safari or Chrome, click the download button on the web site.
Double click the downloaded zip file to decompress it.
Nothing else should be required to download on decompress. Just a normal web browser and the Finder. No fancy utilities or extras.
In the process of trying to get this sorted out, I completely deleted RW from my system. Same with all stacks I could find. At that point, I reinstalled the latest version of RW 8.1.7 and Stacks 3.
In removing RW 8.1.7, I used the app remover from CleanMyMac. This should have found everything related to RW.
My machine has been checked stem to stern by disk utility and by three different virus apps.
After reinstalling RW 8.1.7 and Stacks 3, the stacks that showed as packets under High Sierra continue to show up as directories in Mojave, and not stack packets. If I run stackinstraller once, the packets magically appear. If I shut down and delete stacksinstaller, the packets continue to appear properly.
So my question becomes whether when RW 8.1.7 or Stacks 3 are installed clean under Mojave the combination is supposed to automatically redefines folders (directories) with stack contents with a new file extension .stacks
If this is supposed to happen, it is not â at least so far.
CleanMyMac has probably been your problem all along. @isaiah can speak to this better than I can, but many a person has run into unforeseen problems with CleanMyMac.
Step 1: Clean your Mac of CleanMyMac!
That app apparently wrecks havoc with Stacks, plus probably some other apps on your machine.
3 virus apps?
Could 1 be a problem
Sorry for the snark but that seems excessive,
Virus programs have a way of interfering with some installations.
It feels to me to be a problem peculiar to your setup. But good you got it fixed.
CleanMyMac is not compatible with Stacks. It will delete Stacks resources while Stacks is running. I strongly recommend using either Stacks or CleanMyMac, but never both on the same machine.
I recommend some kind of tech note on the issues we have been chasing.
This stuff is not the least bit obvious, and the problems can stop a customer cold. As they have done in my case.
Another point worth noting. It seems that a number of app developers are driving customers to Mojave. New releases will not run on High Sierra. Onyx is one of these.
You could right-click a stack, choose âGet infoâ, then choose âOpen withâ, select âRapidWeaver 8â and then select âChange Allâ. That should make all stacks install with RW8. I havenât tried it.
short answer: yes. clean my mac can be a bit too exuberant in removing âunneededâ files.
hereâs the detail:
Stacks stores intermediate data in cache files while itâs running. this allows Stacks to use less memory while still giving access to many images and other data. the cached data gets pulled back into memory only as it is needed: e.g. like when youâre publishing or saving your project.
this is a very normal way for a media-heavy app to run and one that is recommended by apple and used by many apps.
unfortunatelyâ i suspect in part because Stacks is not an app per se â clean my mac does not recognize these cache files as âneededâ and it can sometimes remove them while theyâre in use. if these files are removed while Stacks is running the results are catastrophic. Stacks loses all its intermediate data and doesnât quite know what to do. in the worst case stacks might save a file that is missing data â especially large files: i.e. pictures.
even if that worst case is rare, the usual case is pretty bad too: Stacks will try to force itself to crash before corrupting your saved file.
clean my mac can be used judiciously and with extreme care. and, well, when automatically deleting vast numbers of files i think âextreme careâ should go without saying.
at a minimum ensure you have a good backup before letting an app loose to delete things. and on the other hand â maybe donât let apps do that â like ever. itâs like giving Marie Kondo the keys to your house and telling her to go for it!!!
but the point isâŚ
so long as clean my mac is never allowed to remove files while rapidweaver is running, then it is, i suppose, safe enough, for our purposes. but thatâs a lot of caveats to hang on your important work.
more blunt opinion:
you could not pay me enough to run any app like that on my own machine.
disk space is ridiculously cheap. my data is invaluable. no way. no how. nope nope nope.
A question or two remains. I have not run CMM under Mojave since the first of the recent clean installs of RW 8.1.7 and Stacks 3 have been made So, first question is how could the file extensions of the directories disappear (i.e., .stacks removed) when RW 8.1.7 and the new Stacks 3 are installed â without ruining CleanMyMac? That is what is happening.
This suggests to me that either Stacks 3 or RW is not changing the extension of the directories in which the stacks contents are located. Running stacksinstaller once restores the extension of the directories to .stacks and they can be installed perfectly in RW 8.1.7.
Since taking this step, I have had no problems with RW 8.1.7 and Stacks 3 running under Mojave on my MacBook Pro (latest model) under Mojave.
Something strange is going on.
I strongly suggest that a tech note be published by the developers of RW warning of the issues you describe
i donât know of any app that deletes file extensions. are you certain they were deleted? their visibility is a macOS system preference. perhaps you just have extensions disabled?
if not, then i donât know. something you used to unzip them? something else running on your system?
you can always download them again and keep an eye on when this happens.
no app should ever add, remove, or alter file extensions without explicit user consent. neither RW nor Stacks would ever do that.
We have several issues covered here (although much more brief) in our FAQs. Missing files, installing stacks manually, reporting crashes, etc.
Other specific things (such as clean my mac and the myriad other similar utils) are probably best handled on a case by case basis. Too much information can be just as dangerous and twice as daunting, as not enough (see also: WebMD LOL)
However if youâd like any specific FAQ written or updated, just send a note to our support line. Christi is an accomplished technical writer (ironically one of Christiâs first large writing contracts was for the manual very first Mac OS cleaning app. It was called CleanSweep or something like that â way back in 1997, made by Aladdin Systems â who a few years later after a company name change, became a RapidWeaver distributor. wow, small world!!!). Anyway sheâs rather good at the FAQs, so just give her a request and a week or so.
Stack packets from High Sierra are being seen as directories. (See previous posts) It is not possible to change application default. OS X sees a directory as a directory.
Somehow stacksinstaller is able to change the file extention of a directory with stacks content to .stacks No clue how that happens.
Hmm. That may be the theory but Iâve deleted StackInstaller and downloaded a new stack. It shows in Info that it should be opened by RW8 and when I double-click, it opens RW and places the stack in the right place.
Thank you. Let me see what I can do. Based on what I have been seeing, my suspicion remains that there is an obscure bug in either RW 8.1.7 and/or Stacks 3.
Thereâs isnât a bug in RW
There isnât a bug in Stacks
There is though something up with your installation of MacOS or your installation of RW.
Each time you uninstalled RW did you delete the relevant preferences file from the hidden Library folder?
Removing the prefâs for RW will cause a proper reinstall of RW that will restablish the relationship with .stacks
