On 5/12/24 23:29, Greg Troxel wrote:
Do we ever want to build mac apps in pkgsrc? Do we have any now?
A quick grepping shows that x11/modular-xorg-xquartz, misc/plan9port, and security/pinentry-mac are the only packages that install Mac app bundles. The other packages installing *.app are for GNUStep.
pkgsrc packages are meant to behave uniformly on every platform we support IMO. If I installed a regular command-line tool from pkgsrc and it gave me a GUI app instead, that would be a nasty surprise to me.
However, things are not that clear for GUI applications. Most of them don't support Quartz, and require XQuartz to run on Mac. Some applications allow users to choose either X11 or Quartz at build time. Some are very stubborn and never want to give the choice, clinging to the idea that they should absolutely use Quartz and should be built as app bundles if ${OPSYS} happens to be "Darwin" (Hey Firefox, I'm staring at you).
Should GUI applications be built as app bundles if they can be built for Quartz? I'd say no, because they usually also provide a command-line interface for automation (gimp, inkscape, graphviz, ...) and if they were app bundles they lose this important functionality.