Since upgrading to El Capitan (Mac OS X 10.11.6) at the beginning of the year I keep noticing the following warning (in Console's diagnostic messages), immediately followed by 7 other messages (as indicated below):

2018-08-31 2:00:07.713 AAM Updates Notifier[23491]: WARNING: The Gestalt selector gestaltSystemVersion is returning 10.9.6 instead of 10.11.6. This is not a bug in Gestalt -- it is a documented limitation. Use NSProcessInfo's operatingSystemVersion property to get correct system version number.

2018-08-31 2:00:07.713 AAM Updates Notifier[23491]: 0 CarbonCore 0x956dbe3d ___Gestalt_SystemVersion_block_invoke + 135
2018-08-31 2:00:07.713 AAM Updates Notifier[23491]: 1 libdispatch.dylib 0x9ac3771b dispatch_once_f + 78
2018-08-31 2:00:07.713 AAM Updates Notifier[23491]: 2 libdispatch.dylib 0x9ac38fa5 dispatch_once + 31
2018-08-31 2:00:07.713 AAM Updates Notifier[23491]: 3 CarbonCore 0x956578e1 _Gestalt_SystemVersion + 1047
2018-08-31 2:00:07.713 AAM Updates Notifier[23491]: 4 CarbonCore 0x9565708a Gestalt + 154
2018-08-31 2:00:07.713 AAM Updates Notifier[23491]: 5 UpdaterCore 0x060b7128 _ZN3esd11SystemUtils20GetOSPlatformVersionEv + 54
2018-08-31 2:00:07.713 AAM Updates Notifier[23491]: 6 UpdaterCore 0x06040829 _ZN25ThreadGetAvailableUpdates16ThreadWebFeedURL12GetOSVersionEb + 265

It makes reference to an earlier Mac OS X version, namely Mavericks (10.9.6) — which has never been installed on my iMac, since I upgraded directly from Lion (10.7.5) — and recommends that one "Use NSProcessInfo's operatingSystemVersion property to get correct system version number", whatever that means.

Queries: What is this? Is it something I should be concerned about and should deal with — ie, does this really need to be 'fixed'? And if so, how might I address such (keeping in mind that I will not do anything which requires me to go into Terminal).

The Gestalt System Version was introduced to MacOS 6.0.4 to allow applications to dynamically query and find out what facilities are available in the system at run time. The sovereign fix for appears to be a later version of MacOS. Personally although I do recall seeing the Gestalt Selector message, I do not recall any problems created by it.

They never expected version numbering beyond subversion 9, so the numbering gets weird after 10.9.5 Mavericks. It is Y2K all over. On gestaltSystemVersion - Apple Developer

I take it then that I can blithely ignore the so-called warning.
Many thanks.

Gotta love versions. Giant headache. Programmatically, it's NO FUN to try to figure out whether version 7.2 of a piece of software is newer or older than version 7.12 is. You can't compare them mathematically, and the system provides no way to convert to a flat integer, so everyone has to make up their own way to compare, and some are bound to get broken on weird cases. (like version 7.05 or 7.2.B o 7.2B5 etc) Adobe likes to pull those stunts.


And then we note that there's no Windows 9.... you'll find a few explanations floating around for that, but it came down to programming.

The common (possibly sanctioned/recommended?) way to tell if a computer was running a really old version of windows, specifically 95 or 98, was simply to check the first digit for "9". If it sees a 9, nope, that's WAY too old for the installer to run. It apparently broke so many installers (that ran fine on windows 7 and 8) that they had to skip 9.

They SAY officially that they wanted to go with something that seemed more modern, probably in comparison to mac os 10, but the actual reason came down to the quirky fact that "windows 9" would break a lot of software, and a great number of installers available at the time. And even APPLE does that crap with their build numbers for the OS. See the 17G65 below?