> On Jan 26, 2021, at 9:13 PM, Andrew Janke <fl...@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.
