Posting this here, instead of general bug report to RMS just in case other folks are tackling similarly intractable support problems like these.
I have 3 open support tickets right now all with suspiciously similar symptoms:
- Crazy crashing
- Plugins/Stacks not loading/installing
- Reinstallation doesn’t help – sometimes make it worse
I managed to solve one of these and the end solution is kind of crazy. Basically their custom addons location had somehow become really really confused.
Inside RapidWeaver their custom location looked OK. And if they clicked the Reveal in Finder it would pop up the custom folder.
But…
RapidWeaver was clearly not using that folder. It was somehow defaulting back to the standard App Support folder. The user had an old copy of Stacks and other stuff in there. That is the Stacks that was running – and the stacks in that folder were the ones that showed up inside Stacks.
The way we fixed it was to manually disable the custom location. Then restart RW. Then re-add the custom location. The restart RW. That seemed to get things back to normal.
I don’t know how this happened – the user said it was “during a recent Stacks update”. That seems a bit dubious to me. He also had High Sierra and had done the most recent RW update too – so perhaps the update or APFS unhooked something?
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could the bookmark-object that RW uses to store the custom location of the addons folder get mangled by the High Sierra update? or something else?
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if RW does, for whatever reason, get a bad fileURL to the custom location… what’s the expected error behavior there? it seems like silently falling back to the old folder might be it – which seems like it’s generally going to cause pretty serious problems.
@simon: suggestion: if the addons folder can’t be found: start up in “safe” (no addons) mode. and throw up an alert that lets the user reset the location.
why: starting up with ancient addons has the potential for losing data or damaging their file. “safe” mode, while useless, helps the user solve the problem immediately. sort of NSParamameterAssert – but for addons. 