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

[Steven Tamm]

> > 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
> [..]
>
> That was my initial idea. But in the end I like the way the shell 
> script works better. Typing plain "emacs" gives you a new window, 
> while "emacs -nw" gives you the console. It works just like under X 
> Windows. Otherwise there is no way to get a nice window from the 
> command line, except by writing your own shell wrapper. To me that is 
> the only reason to choose the shell script road over the patch you 
> propose (Although I think patch should be there as well, since emacs 
> should never segfault).

Yeah, I think you are right.  The one concern that I had was what would 
happen if the location of the Emacs.app was moved.  Your solution fixes 
that by creating a "shadow" application.  Why not make the whole 
Emacs.app directory be a link to the lib-exec one?  That way you 
wouldn't have the problem of dealing with two sets of files depending 
on whether you did it from the command line or from the finder.  The 
downside is that the icon in the Applications menu would be a little 
screwed up.

As another aside, I think the make-package script should eventually be 
rewritten in perl because of the guarantee that it exists on Mac OS X.  
Any objections.

> > 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.
>
> The question is, does the installer (or pax) automatically copy the 
> file if it's getting unloaded accross filesystems? If so then there's 
> no problem with a hard link.

If Emacs.app is a symlink then it's a non-issue (obviously).  pax at 
that point is just a wrapper around tar (see the man page), so I would 
assume it would do the right thing in any case.

-Steven