orca/native/macos-shipit-scheduling

macOS installer scheduling

Electron's Squirrel launcher submits ShipIt to launchd without ProcessType. The default Standard service receives daemon CPU and I/O limits. After Orca quits, preparing thousands of bundle files can take minutes before any window returns. Reopening Orca during that interval makes ShipIt cancel the update.

This N-API addon wraps +[SQRLShipItLauncher shipItJobDictionary], adding only ProcessType: Interactive to each emitted dictionary. Squirrel still submits the job, handles authorization, validates signatures, replaces the bundle, retries failures and owns relaunch. The executable path, arguments, Mach service and KeepAlive settings remain unchanged. This applies to ordinary quits with a staged update and supervised server installs, as well as Update & Restart.

The method is private to Squirrel. The macOS updater workflow loads the real framework from the pinned Electron distribution and checks that only this key changes. Unsupported signatures and load failures retain the original updater and produce a diagnostic. Unexpected signal or payload shapes pass through unchanged. Native compatibility probes cover those cases and mapping exceptions. Both Mac architectures build during this check.

A source change in Electron's Squirrel dependency would be preferable long term. This hook avoids rebuilding or replacing that dependency and can be removed once Electron sets the service type itself. Changing a running PID with taskpolicy did not reproduce the improvement from setting the launchd job type.

On macOS arm64, a real unmodified update took 75 seconds. Signed Orca 1.4.230 clone installs with Interactive scheduling took 8 seconds with a patched job dictionary and 6 seconds through Squirrel's native job submission. These runs used different cache conditions; they are local observations, not a controlled benchmark or timing guarantee. The signed installer verified each bundle.

The first update into a build containing this fix still uses the previous app's launcher. Faster scheduling starts with updates initiated by the fixed build.