NS port and DESTDIR

NS port and DESTDIR

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Hello all.

I was poking around packaging stuff and noticed that it seems `make install`-ing the self-contained NS port does not handle DESTDIR correctly. Is this intentionally not a supported use case?

Thanks,
Aaron

Re: NS port and DESTDIR

[Alan Third]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 10:10:40PM +0900, Aaron Madlon-Kay wrote:
> Hello all.
> 
> I was poking around packaging stuff and noticed that it seems `make
> install`-ing the self-contained NS port does not handle DESTDIR
> correctly. Is this intentionally not a supported use case?

It looks that way. What are you expecting it to do?
-- 
Alan Third

Re: NS port and DESTDIR

[chad]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1238 bytes --]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 9:23 AM Aaron Madlon-Kay <aaron@madlon-kay.com>
wrote:

> I was poking around packaging stuff and noticed that it seems `make
> install`-ing the self-contained NS port does not handle DESTDIR correctly.
> Is this intentionally not a supported use case?
>

(Forgive me if this has changed in the last couple years.)

The ns port "self contained app" puts everything inside the .app directory,
which is very much the standard in the macOS world, and makes it possible
to have, for example, multiple distinct emacs installations simultaneously,
as well as to distribute emacs from a build-capable machine to other
machines just by passing around the .app directory. (I gather that flatpak
and snap are efforts to bring this sort of organization to other systems.)
In this world, it's hard to see what DESTDIR would/should do. What were you
expecting? Is there something that you're trying to do when building emacs
that doesn't work? (My memory says that the options for macOS that ARE NOT
self-contained are likely seriously underused, but since they're basically
"do what you do on nearly every unix-like system", they should pretty much
work, IFF you disable the self-contained app option.

Hope that helps,
~Chad

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1671 bytes --]

Re: NS port and DESTDIR

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Thank you, Alan and Chad.

I was naively expecting that the Emacs.app bundle would appear in $DESTDIR. Thanks for clarifying that this is not really intended to work.

I am actually working on a packaging issue with the Mac port, and I wanted to understand how the NS port was intended to behave.

The Mac port is a bit different in that it offers a configure option to specify the output location of the app bundle, but I find that when I customize the location (and specify a self-contained bundle, which is a separate option for the Mac port) the resulting bundle is missing some pieces.

Given these differences, it seems the problem is solely on the Mac port side. 

Thanks for the info,
Aaron