[Development] glib's and Qt's RuntimeLocation [OS X]

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Tuesday November 24 2015 10:30:32 Hausmann Simon wrote:

Hi,

>I think the chances of a Qt application depending on glib on Mac OS X are extremely slim, 
>given that glib is not part of the default system installation.

That strikes me as a bit of a surprising argument for a middleware that is cross-platform by its very nature, and not any more part of a default system installation than glib...
Chances of a direct dependency appear slim, but they increase (probably considerably) if you consider indirect dependencies.
And of course glib isn't likely to be the only API on which applications can depend and that uses the concept of a user runtime directory that's based on XDG principles.

Note that I'm not really calling your choice into question (a bit more the fact that RuntimeLocation returns the "AppSupport" root, and leaves it to the application to add e.g. its name, to comply with sandboxing principles).

>I think the much more common case of a Qt application on Mac OS X is to just use Qt and the system APIs without any third-party library dependency. So I think it makes sense if our defaults align towards that use-case and with what apple recommends for applications. Their documentation makes a compelling case IMO:
>
>https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/FileSystemProgrammingGuide/FileSystemOverview/FileSystemOverview.html

What part exactly? I don't have access to my Mac right now, but it seems to me that OS X also has equivalent user directories under /var (/private/var if you prefer).

R