Re: MacOS release help

[Alex Harker]

> On 18 Oct 2022, at 00:05, Carl Sorensen <carl.d.sorensen@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> IMO, what we most want is an app bundle that can be easily relocated anywhere 
> and that provides all of the binaries used by LilyPond.  Frescobaldi can be 
> pointed at that app bundle to run LilyPond.
> 
> I recognize that most apps have a GUI.  But it's not strictly necessary to 
> have a GUI in the app bundle, if I understand correctly.

I can’t be certain on whether the GUI is strictly necessary, because I’ve never 
considered the alternative, but an app bundle with no GUI is not something I’ve 
ever seen on MacOS, so I would not advise making one. 

However, the notion of a MacOS package on Mac is more general than an app 
bundle, and is simply a folder that has some metadata. The contents of the 
folder can be whatever you want, whereas an app bundle implies other things 
(like it will launch when double clicked and I think the bundle structure is 
expected to follow a given pattern). If what is required is just a single 
’thing’ (as far as most users are concerned) then a package (but not a app) 
might be most appropriate. They can be used for anything where a bunch of 
structured resources should be kept together (some apps use them for documents, 
for instance, such as Logic Pro X - which allows it to keep a bunch of audio 
files inside something that looks like a ‘file').

The downside of the package approach would be usage entirely on the command 
line, although the barrier may be too small to be considered relevant. In the 
terminal packages act just folders and you can cd into them. In the finder you 
can also look inside them, but need to explicitly open them with a right-click 
contextual menu selection to ’Show Package Contents’. Most end users are 
unaware of this and see packages as if they were opaque files. I also don’t 
know how a package approach would operate if someone wanted to install to 
usr/local or similar in order to be able to run lilypond binaries without 
having to type the full location - I can take a look at that.

Alex