Mac: "SWI-Prolog" cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.

[munro]

Hello! On macOS, when I open SWI-Prolog downloaded from the official stable release, I get a warning:

"SWI-Prolog" cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.

macOS cannot verify that this app is free from malware.

I've downloaded https://www.swi-prolog.org/download/stable/bin/swipl-9.2.5-1.fat.dmg from https://www.swi-prolog.org/download/stable

Which is fine, I can right click and open, to open it anyways. But this issue all stemmed from trying to add it as a cask to homebrew so that's it's easy to install and be able to use gtrace (the formula in homebrew core currently doesn't have the X extensions built in).

From what I understand, it is built without a mac developer license — I know this is kind of a PITA, and the license costs 99 USD/yr. But it would be nice if it was signed so users don't get this scary popup, and it can be included into homebrew.

---

Here is the relevant homebrew PR to add the SWI-Prolog GUI version as a cask: Homebrew/homebrew-cask#176803

And the error saying to contact upstream developers to see if the package can get signed & notarized 🥺

 - Signature verification failed:
/private/tmp/cask-audit20240614-6312-g0ks2n/SWI-Prolog.app: rejected

macOS on ARM requires software to be signed.
Please contact the upstream developer to let them know they should sign and notarize their software.

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/actions/runs/9523416525/job/26254792782?pr=176803#step:9:19

[JanWielemaker]

Yes. This is a PITA 😢 . I was not aware that it gets even more serious with MacOS on ARM. There is some detail in https://www.msweet.org/blog/2020-12-10-macos-notarization.html. One of the remarks in there is that notarized runtimes do not support dynamic loading. That would be a bummer.

If you have experience with or pointers to setting this up for a programming environment or similar software that is built using CMake (rather than Xcode), please share. The $99 is manageable, although a personal license is not very clean for an open source project ...