Re: Building wxt terminal for OS X

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 17 November 2006 01:33 pm, Joe Koski wrote:
> I think Per's assessment is correct. The problem is not with wxt, but with
> the necessity for "bundling" wxWidget applications for native use on the
> Mac. 

Bizarre O/S design.

> That requires either extensive modifications to the gnuplot make files, 
> or a special separate make file approach for the Mac.

I don't think that's true. From what I have found via Googling, nothing
special should be required in building the application (gnuplot).
Creating the bundle is a separate step, and could have its own Makefile
or installation script.

I am hampered by never having had to install anything like this on a Mac,
but it sounds to me from all your descriptions that the problem is that if
you bundle gnuplot, its controlling terminal is not the one you launched
it from.  Rather, it must have a controlling terminal app as part of the
bundle.  I guess this is the iTerm approach that someone mentioned.
Furthermore, I suspect that the info.Plist file must contain one or more
lines that establishes that the gnuplot plot window gets the focus in
parallel to, or instead of, the controlling terminal app.  How one does
any of that is beyond me.

I found only one similar complaint about lack of focus via Googling.
In that case the problem was that the application name in info.Plist 
did not precisely match the directory tree name in which the app had 
been placed. Just a thought.

Anyhow, it sounds to me like this needn't hold up a 4.2 release, because
it is a post-build installation problem, and probably doesn't require 
changes to the gnuplot code per se.  If it turns out that minor changes
are required in the wxt code, that can be a follow-on patch of relevance
only to Mac users.  Maybe fink or Darwin will bundle it with gnuplot
(in the normal sense of the word, not this strange Mac-ish meaning of
"bundle") and provide an easy installation source for general users.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742