Collings wrote:Guys, I love you and appreciate how hard you work. But I've spent months not upgrading to 7 (and not upgrading my only mac from a now very old version of MacOS) because the only way I can get information is to spend my free time sifting through this forum. I wanted to install a HomeBridge plugin that requires Indigo 7, and I did a quick search a few months ago to see if there was anything I needed to be afraid of. The first thing I came across is this thread in Announcements:
High Sierra - our yearly warning [UPDATED WITH WARNING INFO]
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19100It sounds like Apple broke the fragile USB Insteon stuff? The last message in that thread was in January. It's June now. I'm left to assume that it's still screwed up? I spent an hour just now trying to figure that out. I found page 4 of some other thread that links to a "workaround" that was posted one day after the last post in the announcements thread:
http://www.indigodomo.com/blog/2018/01/ ... orkaround/So, does this mean the workaround solves the problem in the announcements thread? Is the workaround still necessary in 10.13.4? 10.13.5? That stale announcement thread is certainly keeping me from upgrading.
How many systems are affected by this USB nonsense?
When will Insteon ever move to a more reliable (or at least widely supported) USB chipset? Maybe the one that's in my ancient printer or any of my other myriad USB devices that have never had a connectivity problem and never been destroyed by a power failure?
How can I know when it's safe to upgrade without spending an hour every few weeks mining forum threads?
Thank you.
First, the very first sentence in the first post of the warning thread (the first link you posted above) has a link to the driver bug workaround (the second link you posted) that you apparently missed and subsequently found after "mining" other threads. Apple has acknowledged the bug but will not (they never do) give developers who submit bugs any idea if/when any given bug will be fixed. All we will see is that magically one day our bug report will change states. We will post on that thread when Apple claims to have solved the issues. With regard to the workaround, most users who experience the bugs report that the workaround works correctly. We've had a couple of reports of it only partially working, and one report of it not working at all, but because the workaround implementation procedure is somewhat tricky we think that if you follow it exactly you're chance of success is high.
Second, Apple didn't break Insteon - they broke any device that uses the FTDI driver, which is the most used and most reliable USB UART chipset out there. This is definitely one scenario where Insteon is totally blameless. The first sentence in the warning post also mentions that can effect the RFXCOM devices as well since they use the same chipset.
Third, there is some unknown subset of Macs which have the issue. We suspect it's older Macs but we don't know for sure because we don't have one model of every Mac ever made to test with. All we can do is relay the experiences that we have directly and those others report to us. Once we discovered the workaround, we've not really had much of a follow-up from others about subsequent dot releases. As we get them, we'll post them on that first thread (I'll be adding one for 10.13.5 - we just got a report today that indicates the bug still exists).
We try very hard to clarify what things work and don't work with respect to 3rd party dependencies. We have no direct control over them, particularly with Apple, so what we're doing is the best we can do. Our users are generally technical enough that they can determine for themselves the risks associated with any given change to their environment, and yes that sometimes requires doing some research. At this point, I'd recommend upgrading Indigo 7 without upgrading your OS - doing multiple upgrades at the same time is often a recipe for disaster. If your Mac isn't on Lion, then consider upgrading to Sierra instead, making sure that things are stable for you, then upgrade to Indigo 7. Stepwise change is always best.