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

[Steven Tamm]

On Saturday, November 30, 2002, at 02:48  PM, David Caldwell wrote:

> On 11/30/02 2:23 PM -0800 Steven Tamm wrote:
>
> > For the list: Why does "make install" install two identical copies of 
> > the
> > executable; emacs & emacs-21.3.50?  Why is emacs not a symbolic link?
>
> It's a hard link... ls -i and check that the inodes are the same 
> number.

Now I feel like an idiot.  I even checked for that, but in the wrong 
directory.  I'll revert it, test it, and check it in.

> I have some patches for make-package as well. Should I send them to 
> the list?

Yes, please.

> The second one is more controversial, I think. I made a little shell 
> wrapper that launches the Emacs.app so that typing plain "emacs" in 
> the shell doesn't segfault. Since the user should be free to move his 
> /Applications/Emacs.app around as he sees fit, I can't call that 
> wrapper. So I made a duplicate app wrapper in libexec. I hard linked 
> it to the emacs exe in /Applications/Emacs.app so it doesn't take up 
> any more room in the disk image, nor on the system. It has complete 
> transparency to the user, I think.

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

/* Determine if the executable is not in a bundle, and if so, do not 
attempt
   to start up the window system */
void
mac_determine_bundle_status()
{
#if MAC_OSX
  extern int inhibit_window_system;
  extern int noninteractive;
  CFBundleRef appsBundle;

  /* No need to test if already -nw*/
  if (inhibit_window_system || noninteractive)
    return;


  appsBundle = CFBundleGetMainBundle();
  if (appsBundle != NULL)
    {
      CFStringRef cfBI = CFSTR("CFBundleIdentifier");
      CFTypeRef res = CFBundleGetValueForInfoDictionaryKey(appsBundle, 
cfBI);
      /* We found the bundle identifier, now we know we are valid. */
      if (res != NULL)
        {
          CFRelease(res);
          return;
        }
    }

  /* Unless we actually find the resource, set -nw */
  inhibit_window_system = 1;
#endif
}

BTW, I think making  Contents/MacOS/Emacs be a hard link to 
emacs-21.3.50 is a bad idea.  The Application may (and in my case 
usually will) live on a different volume than the /usr/local tree.  
I'll keep the symlink option there for the Application, but remove the 
bad behavior.

-Steven