Re: [Pyobjc-dev] buildapplication strawman

[Just v. R. <ju...@le...>]

Jack Jansen wrote:

> > But you don't do anything with the pathname but get the base name,
> > strip the extension and use it as the NSMainNibFile Info.plist key,
> > right? Why not just write "MainMenu" and be done with it?
> 
> Yes, it's added to the resources. Ah, I now see your "The .lproj or
> individual nibs should then be listed as a resource" sentence. So you
> want the user to pass the main nib twice, once as a file and once as
> a name. Hmm, yes, with nibs in ..lprojs I can see the point. Ok, fine
> with me, but you should probably add a check that the main nib
> actually exists.

I read your code, and it just picks an arbitrary nib if there are more than one,
I don't quite understand how you can defend that...

[I don't quite get Bill's comment regarding this, we're assembling an app, not
_using_ nibs, so I don't see the relevance of the system API's here.]

> > BuildApplet is great for very simple things, and worked fine on OS9
> > where everything you needed could live in <scriptname>.rsrc. But I
> > don't think this approach is all that useful for .app bundles but
> > for the simplest of scripts. Then again: BuildApplet-like
> > functionality could easily be built on top of this.
> 
> But don't forget that there are many "very simple things". About 100%
> of the scripts ported over from unix, for instance. But as I said: if
> you're writing the code you decide how to do it.

I find it very limiting in reality: as soon as a unix script has options the
argv emulation is hardly useful.

> > My working code currently needs to munge the wrapper even more: I
> > need to specify the Python executable in case it's copied to
> > Contents/Resources/. It's a tiny amount of code and works for me
> > just fine as a triple-quoted string. [Reading this back: I need to
> > do even more if we need to set PYTHONHOME conditionally.]
> 
> Could be done dynamically:
>      bindir = os.path.split(argv[0])[0]
>      if os.path.exists(os.path.join(bindir, "python")):
>          We are a self-contained application, set PYTHONHOME and use 
> this python
>      else:
>          We are an applet. Set PYTHONPATH and use /usr/bin/python

Ok, that's an option. But I don't really like runtime checks for things that are
known at build time, and I really don't see any problem with using a tiny
triple-quoted string as template.

> > The stuff I would _especially_ like to avoid is the Mac-specific
> > main, with __main__/__rawmain__ magic. I want to use the vanilla
> > unix main, or rather the vanilla unix _executable_. Trivial with
> > the execve template.
> 
> But unfortunately the __rawmain__ trick is needed for one of the most
> useful applications of an applet: taking a standard unix Python
> script and turning it into a droplet.

Don't you want to move the argv emulation to Python as well? It's hairy stuff
and I think we could win a great deal to have it in Python. I really think we
should strive to use a vanilla main, and the execve wrapper makes it all
possible.

Just