Where are GUI apps for ports installed?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 10, 2013, at 21:39, Jerry wrote:

> Some ports install a double-clickable binary in /Applications/MacPorts. 
> 
> However, the only things installed in that location are on my system are AquaTerm, Pallet, some python 2.7 auxiliary stuff, and something related to Qt4 called qmlplugindump.
> 
> I have the Spyder port installed and there is a binary for it but it does not install in this location but rather apparently in
> 
> /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python
> 
> with a symlink in /opt/local/bin to another small file which is a short python script which launches it.
> 
> A different situation is cmake. When I install this from another place (probably the official cmake developer site), there is a GUI application placed in /Applications. However, the MacPorts version apparently does not install a GUI app anywhere.
> 
> I find this a little disconcerting. Is there a MacPorts policy about these kinds of things?

The policy is that if a port installs an OS X GUI application, it goes in ${applications_dir}, a.k.a. /Applications/MacPorts unless you've changed it.

For non-OS X GUIs, like X11 GUIs, they may only be available in /opt/local/bin, or there may also be a launcher in /Applications/MacPorts; port authors who wish to add the latter to their ports can do so using the app 1.0 portgroup.

In the case of the cmake port, it appears to have a gui variant which you could presumably select to get the GUI, in addition to the command line utilities that are always installed. I haven't tried it. It would be better if the maintainer changed this from a variant to a subport so that users wouldn't need to rebuild the main port and so that users could benefit from precompiled binaries.