Hi all,
We build most of our third party libraries for our Windows packages using CI jobs in the wireshark-vcpkg-scripts repository and distribute the resultant artifacts using the wireshark-development-libraries. I've been experimenting with using those two repositories to do the same for macOS. This would make it easier to update and maintain our macOS dependencies and let people build Wireshark with the libraries that we ship with the official installer.
You can track the progress at MR 19669, and so far it has been working well. Similar to our Windows environment, if you set WIRESHARK_BASE_DIR to a directory you can write to, CMake will automatically download and extract each library, and the downloads are automatically refreshed whenever there are any updates.
I'm slowly making my way through our dependency list and adding each library, and once that's done I plan on using the new libraries for our official packages. At that point we'll need to figure out what to do with macos-setup.sh, e.g. leave it as-is, scale it back, or deprecate it completely.
I've also been able to build each library as a universal binary so far, so we might be able to fix issue #17294 as well.