[Development] Frameworks on Mac?

[Volker Götz]

Am 22.11.2012 um 13:03 schrieb Rutledge Shawn:
>> 
>> The regular way is to have application bundles (directories with a certain structure; the name ends on .app and is treated like a single file in the Finder) that contain everything that is needed to run the program, including all libraries and/or frameworks that are not pre-installed on the system. You just put that application binary into a ZIP or (preferrably) a disk image (DMG) and the user just drags and drops the application to a place on the filesystem.
> 
> Yeah I know, and that's very convenient, but I've seen installers sometimes too.  
> 
> We could even offer a way to make it easy for application developers to make installers, in order to standardize the Qt framework installation at bit more.  For example QBS could generate a target to build an installer.  If it will save memory on users' systems, it seems like a good thing, right?
> 
> Or maybe an application could install or upgrade the framework the first time it is run, and then delete its own copy from inside the .app bundle?  I'm sure that's unconventional, but I wonder if it's possible.

While that may ease the live of developers, it will annoy the *users* of the application for sure. Mac folks are used to just drag an application bundle and drop it somewhere. Installers for applications are rarely used and regarded inconvenient. Additionally, if you want to remove something that has been deployed with an installer, you're basically lost, as there is NO builtin means to do that.

Do it the Mac way on a Mac (application bundle that contains everything) (*1)
Do it the Linux way on Linux (a distro package)
Do it the Windows way on a Windows box (usually an installer)
Don't try to mimic the behavior on one platform on another one just for the sake of developers' laziness, but think of a good deployment UX for your application's users.

(*1) whether using frameworks or plain dylibs doesn't matter here

Cheers
Volker

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