Relative executable path. Was Re: gnuplot Mac pkg

[Nicolas B. (INED) <br...@in...>]

> Le 10 mars 2016 à 23:21, Allin Cottrell <cot...@wf...> a écrit :
> There's now an updated build at
> 
> http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/pub/gnuplot/gnuplot-5.0.3-quartz.dmg <http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/pub/gnuplot/gnuplot-5.0.3-quartz.dmg>

I looked at your dmg above and everything seems working but the hard link to gnuplot.gih could be replaced with its “standard" location -DHELPFILE=\"/usr/local/share/gnuplot/5.0/gnuplot.gih\" instead of yours at build time:
gnuplot> help set ter
/home/cottrell/stats/q2/Gretl.app/Contents/Resources/share/gnuplot/5.0/gnuplot.gih: No such file or directory
Then anyone could avoid the use of your script “gnuplot.sh" with the environments GNUHELP,GNUPLOT_PS_DIR. And at installation time the .dmg could move this important file to /usr/locall/share/gnuplot/5.0/. I agree that it is not completely the spirit of OS/X and Apps.

But it seems that the following command to get the correct relative path to binary doesn’t go into error but does a simple ‘touch’ without any warinng!
$ install_name_tool -change /usr/local/share/gnuplot/5.0/gnuplot.gih @executable_path/../share/gnuplot.gih bin/gnuplot

@executable_path works only (yet?) for objects.

On Linux we could use readlink("/proc/self/exe", buf, bufsize) or argv[0] to get the binary location, but on OS/X I don’t know.

After the error No such file or directory, does gnuplot search for any other location? On OS/X we could try the path given by -DHELPFILE=\”$BINDIR/../share/gnuplot/5.0/gnuplot.gih\” before displaying the error but BINDIR should not be hardcoded but equivalent to @executable_path, that is dependent on where the binary is installed and executed. I even don’t know if it exists on Linux. 

But the success of OS/X resides in the fact any App is using its own dated libraries (under the lib, share etc subdirectories) giving to the application a longer life expectancy. The time where disk space was a problem is over today. Thus we can have many different versions of a library on our hard disk. What  the user is expecting is a working App. Moving the App to the bin if it is too old.


--
Nicolas

> 
> Allin Cottrell
> 
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