[Fink-devel] .app's in fink

[John Davidorff Pell]

First, This is a STUPID discussion. That said, I'm going to add my $0.02.

A normal user can write to /Applications b/c a normal mac user is the *only* user on the machine and is therefore (by default) the administrator as defined by apple's admin group. People here are arguing about what *should* be the case, how about we focus the yelling on what *is* the case. Apple has made it so that the normal admin user can mess w/ /Applications. Therefore, most users will want to be able to mess w/ /sw/Applications.

I noticed someone asked about apple's way of keeping track of its apps when moved, and they use the same method as with aliases. each app is identifiable by its alias info. fink can make use of this if someone out there wants to spend the next six months re-writing dpkg. You want to ? Go ahead, I would love it! really!

Granted that most users of fink know enough that if it is very difficult to move an app out of /sw/applications, you probably shouldn't, but at the same time, the user COULD force move the app and it would work, until dpkg looked for it. thus until there would probably be a long while between times dpkg looks for it and then the user might not know that moving the app was the problem with an error message that looks just like all the other unix messages he has ever seen.

It is also possible to make .app packages that consist entirely of symlinks (but the .app package is still a real folder with a real info.plist). just link *.app/contents to some fink dir, or even *.app/contents/macos/appname to the fink binary in /sw/bin. this might actually work! (until you read this and find the gaping holes in my solution... ;)) I think that .apps should only be added on a per case basis and some usage of the above would be useful (symlinks rule!)

JP



-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.NET email is sponsored by:
SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See!
http://www.vasoftware.com
_______________________________________________
Fink-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel