Re: Progress on Mac installation cloning

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2016, Thomas Mattison wrote:

> The goal is to make it easy for a non-computer-science student to 
> install gnuplot on a reasonably modern Mac. [...]
>
> As I learned yesterday, the existing gnuplot makefile supports
> "make DESTDIR=/tmp/gnuplot install"
> That makes a tree starting at /tmp/gnuplot/usr
> I copied that tree to a flash drive as gnuplot64/usr
> I made a short script file to the gnuplot64 directory:
>
> #!/bin/sh
> echo "This script must be run from an account with administrative privileges"
> echo "You must enter the administrative user's password"
> sudo rsync -arv usr/* /usr

In the Mac world, the "right way" to do this is to build gnuplot as 
an app "bundle", including all libraries that are required, then 
make a "flat package" of the bundle. That way your students could 
just download the pkg file and double-click to install it. All this 
can be done via Xcode, either GUI or command-line tools. (It can 
also be done using cross-tools on Linux, but I don't suppose you 
want to get into that.)

I take Ethan's point about shared libraries -- ideally, they should 
be installed to a common location and shared across application 
programs -- nonetheless it's not the way third-party apps do things 
on the Mac. Unless you're going all the way with a third-party 
package system such as MacPorts or Homebrew, but I gather your 
students wouldn't be up to that.

If you want to try out the app bundle approach, the basic idea is
to create a drectory

/Applications/Gnuplot.app/Contents/Resources

and build/install everything you need with that prefix. There's more 
to it, of course, but that's a good start.

Allin Cottrell