So, I decided to give this “McWilliams” thing a shot on my Mac the other day. Heard some whispers about it, you know, in those dusty corners of old forums, saying it could really streamline how I handle my dev projects on macOS. Sounded too good to be true, and well, you know how that usually goes.
First, actually getting my hands on it was a mission. No official site, no easy download link. Just some cryptic references and finally found a ZIP file on a server that looked like it hadn’t been updated since Leopard. Not a great start, but I was committed, or maybe just stubborn.
Then came the setup. Oh boy. There wasn’t an installer, of course. Just a bunch of scripts and a README file that might as well have been written in ancient runes. I fired up my terminal, feeling like some kind of digital archaeologist. And then the errors started. So many errors. It was like my Mac was actively trying to reject this McWilliams thing.
It complained about dependencies I didn’t have, then about versions of things I did have. I spent a whole afternoon just chasing down these little bits and pieces. One minute I’m trying to compile some obscure C_EXTENSION, the next I’m fiddling with environment variables that haven’t been relevant for a decade. My system felt like it was getting cluttered with all this old junk I was trying to install just to make McWilliams happy.
I even had to dig through some super old mailing list archives. Found one post from like, 2007, where someone had a similar problem. Tried their fix. Didn’t quite work, but it changed the error message, so I guess that’s progress? At one point, I swear my trackpad started acting funny. Probably just me being paranoid, but still.
After what felt like an eternity, probably two full days of on-and-off tinkering, I got a part of it to run. And what was this magical McWilliams experience? Well, it was… clunky. To say the least. The interface, if you could call it that, was barebones and ugly. And the core thing it was supposed to do? I think I could rig up something better with a few Automator scripts, honestly.
So, yeah. My big experiment with “mac mcwilliams.” A whole lot of effort for not much reward. I guess some things are left in the past for a good reason. I spent another hour just trying to clean up all the stuff it made me install. Pretty sure I’m still finding stray config files in weird places.
My takeaway? If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and the only way to get it is from a sketchy download link from 2005, it’s probably not going to be a smooth ride on your modern Mac. Stick to tools that, you know, actually want to be used. This McWilliams adventure? Definitely one for the “lessons learned the hard way” pile.
