Cardinal deprecation from brew because of gatekeeper check

[just-maiyak]

Hello !

I recently updated my version of Cardinal through brew and I got a message saying the formula is getting deprecated on 2026-09-01 because it is not signed and thus not passing a gatekeeper test that has been recently enforced on their end.

I guess the binary should be signed in some way but I have no experience in this regard so I cannot help by opening a PR for now.

Is signing the macOS binary something that should be looked into ?

[falkTX]

I looked into it and @dromer added support for it for his own plugins recently too.
See DISTRHO/DPF@bbedb38 for related work on this.

The main issue is 2 fold:

• signing requires 100€/year fee to Apple
• even if I wanted to pay Apple, I literally cannot. My bank account is from Portugal (as I am Portuguese, that bank works well for me) but my legal / current address is in Germany. Apple does not allow payments from a bank card that does not match current location 🤷

[just-maiyak]

Ouch yeah the developer fee is quite pricey. I noticed there is a fee waiver for non profits, I'm posting the resource here just in case someone needs it in the future : https://developer.apple.com/help/account/membership/fee-waivers/

[dromer]

It's not as bad as for microsoft, there you typically have to go through a third party certificate reseller and you pay 3-4x the price.

[falkTX]

Alternative question back... why doesn't brew build the software itself? I understand if it was closed source it could only fetch release binaries, but there is no need to limit for that when a project is open-source.
Plus, brew-initiated builds would allow to use system shared libraries instead of needing to build them statically.

Building cardinal is a simple matter of cloning recursively and just running "make". It takes a bit of time due to all the modules, but it is really simple to build.

https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal/blob/main/docs/BUILDING.md#macos

[falkTX]

I went ahead and asked them https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/6521