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

[David Caldwell <david@porkrind.org>]

On 11/30/02 3:19 PM -0800 Steven Tamm wrote:

> On Saturday, November 30, 2002, at 02:48  PM, David Caldwell wrote:
>
>> On 11/30/02 2:23 PM -0800 Steven Tamm wrote:
>>
>> I have some patches for make-package as well. Should I send them to
>> the list?
>
> Yes, please.

Ok. I'll do so shortly.

>> 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
[..]

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).

> 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.

-David