Desolate Condition

[Craig Treleaven]

> On Jan 26, 2021, at 9:13 PM, Andrew Janke <floss at apjanke.net> wrote:
> 
> Possibly relevant: I'm co-maintainer of Octave.app, a "native" Mac app
> distribution of GNU Octave (https://octave-app.org/). It's currently
> built on top of Homebrew.
> 
> I'm tentatively planning on migrating Octave.app to be built on top of
> MacPorts in the near future. Partially because I think MacPorts is a
> more stable, configurable, "pro" tool more suitable to building
> redistributable apps (which is explicitly not supported by Homebrew),
> but mostly because I refuse to upgrade from macOS 10.14 (because I'm an
> Aperture user) and Homebrew's going to drop support for 10.14.
> 
> The way this thing works is that I set up a whole Homebrew installation
> under a custom prefix at "/Applications/Octave-<version>.app" and then
> wrap that up as an app bundle.
> 
> Do y'all have any advice for me?
> 
> If this transition happens, a "Powered by MacPorts!" banner goes on the
> bottom of our website. I have absolutely no clue how many users we have,
> but I know that at least a couple hundred European college students
> along with some scientists in the US are using it.

I have used MacPorts to package a substantial application (MythTV).  As an overview, MythTV and all its dependencies were installed to a custom prefix (/opt/dvr)*.  A couple of helper apps (Applescripts, if you want the full truth) are the only things installed under /Applications/MacPorts/MythTV.  The package installer recreates this layout on the destination machine.  I don’t see why you couldn’t continue with your current layout, however.

MacPorts provides support to create a standard package installer (port mpkg) or dmg (port mdmg).  See man port-mpkg for the basics.  If it helps, I wrote a wiki page with a few of the issues that I encountered:

https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/CreateInstallers

Ping me if you have questions.

Craig
* In a custom prefix, _everything_ has to be built from source.  The initial build will take a _long_ time.  A very long time.