ok, but why am I getting the crash, after I ran your updated script?
As in, your dmg that was created before mine is fine, this is odd. We need to find out what's different.

Jamie, could you please take some screenshots of your main settings within Kstars ? I just want to make sure mine is setup as yours.

Actually you should be able to make it work in spite of what it said. Try dragging the app from the dmg to the desktop, then right click on it to "show package contents." Inside you can navigate to "Contents/MacOS" and you should see a binary file called "KStars" in there. That is the actual program inside the app bundle. if you open terminal and drag that binary directly on top of the terminal window, it will type the path to the kstars binary in the terminal. Hit enter, it will start KStars. As a bonus, it will show you all sorts of information about the running application in the terminal window.

There is nothing that should actually prevent the app from running on El Capitan, except for the fact that it was built on Sierra. I got it to run on my wife's laptop this way. That being said, there are still some issues with getting the indiserver working in the app. But the app that you downloaded should run on your computer, and you can do most of the things kstars can do! Play around with it and report any issues! Have fun!

Thank you very much Stephane! We definitely should look into how to flag the app so that it can run in versions of OS X other than just Sierra. But I would try to make sure it actually will run on the OS we say that it will run on first

I shall look into how to flag the app, which OS X version do we want to aim for as a minimum?
I'm not fussed, but I only have Sierra at home so I won't be able to test on anything lower than Sierra.

looks like we need to have something like the following in ./configure :
-mmacosx-version-min=

I don't know exactly where you need to declare it, googling for it shows many answers.

I will see if I can try this tomorrow-
it looks like it is something like

-DCMAKE_OSX_SYSROOT=macosx -DCMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.11

when I do the cmake

EDIT-

oh- even if that is right, I have no idea how to do that with the emerge.

What if you set the deployment environment variable like you set all the other environment variables before you do the emerge?

That seems to have done the trick. My wife's computer is still on el capitan, and when I open the dmg from the other day on it I see that little ( / ) over the icon, but with the variable exported as 10.10 I was able to open and run it. I replaced the one out on my dropbox (www.dropbox.com/s/eoqstbm3uw3ozbc/kstars.dmg?dl=0) with the new one.

I did a brew upgrade and it didn't bump my jasper version - not sure why we have the discrepancy.

Stephane - can you try the script again on your machine? One of the searches that I did for the crash - this part:seemed to lean towards that same target thing (stackoverflow.com/questions/14268887/wha...acosx-version-min-10)

I did notice one thing - when I ran on my wife's computer and went through the settings stuff (the data dir and such) I saw this:

cool, let me run the script again now.

first thing, to be sure I'm running the latest scripts:

EDIT:
running the script again... probably just a glitch on my network. I think that's because the MBA goes to sleep and kills the wifi.

Good find with stackoverflow.com/questions/14268887/wha...acosx-version-min-10
However, what I do not understand is that my MBA and MBP are running the same OS X version and are both fully up to date.
The script is still running, it will take some time (not too much) I will report after testing the dmg on the MBP.