Re: Mac OS X GNU Emacs Installer (make-package)

[Andrew Choi]

Steven Tamm <address@hidden> writes:

> [...]  This is the solution that Andrew proposes.
> /usr/local/bin/emacs would be a shell script that calls
> /usr/local/bin/emacs-21.3.50 -nw $*.  I don't like that solution very
> much.  This is a patch I placed on the list earlier; it causes the
> executable to determine if it is inside an application bundle.  If it
> is not, it will cause it to inhibit_windowing_system.  I placed the
> call to this right after the call to init_mac_osx_environment inside
> emacs.c:main

Hi Steven,

Actually the idea (which hasn't been implemented) was to have `make
install' install only one executable on the entire system: the one in
the Emacs.app application bundle.  Then /usr/local/bin/emacs would be
the shell script:

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs "$@"

(or whatever path leading to it).  This way you get the application in
the Finder, and you can start it from the command line, in either GUI or
terminal mode.  And since the executable is always placed in the
application bundle, there's no danger of it not finding its resources.
I'm not against simply printing an error message and exiting or adding
your patch, which starts Emacs in terminal mode (possibly after printing
out a warning message) if someone has unknowingly moved it outside the
application bundle.

I don't have a strong preference to implement package distribution one
way or another.  But I was considering the different options one can
specify for make-package, which will result in the quite a few
differently-configured packages people can distribute.  I also think
some of the options are not achievable by people building from source
using `make', which is a little strange.  Imagine the amount of
questions we'll be getting :-).

I've also remove mac/make-bin-dist and mac/osx-install, which are
obsolete now.  Perhaps we should mention make-package in mac/INSTALL.

Andrew.