[CMake] Using CPack with OSX 10.9

[Williams, Norman K]

I would look at how CMake itself is packaged for release.

The ‘one executable per App bundle’ is Apple-centric thinking that luckily is not enforced.  That isn’t how CMakes (or the OS X Emacs, e.g.) works. You can have whatever you want in an app bundle.

It does means that after install, users need to add the directory inside the bundle to their PATH environment variable, if the extra programs are meant to be command line executables.  You’d want whatever GUI program that is your main program to be the executable run when you open the app bundle.

The problem is that what you’re trying to do doesn’t map neatly onto the Apple world, so you have to choose the least worst workaround.  For that matter, using a compressed tar instead of an App Bundle would work too.

From: "Lachlan.Hetherton at csiro.au<mailto:Lachlan.Hetherton at csiro.au>" <Lachlan.Hetherton at csiro.au<mailto:Lachlan.Hetherton at csiro.au>>
Date: Monday, July 28, 2014 at 8:06 PM
To: CMake Users <cmake at cmake.org<mailto:cmake at cmake.org>>
Subject: [CMake] Using CPack with OSX 10.9

Hi there,

We’re looking to update our CMake packaging scripts so that we can deploy to OSX 10.9 Mavericks. For previous OSX releases, we have used the PackageMaker generator with CPack to create .pkg files inside .dmg files. I believe PackageMaker has now disappeared (I can’t run the old version on my current machine and there doesn’t seem to be a new version available anywhere), so I would like to ask you all: what is the preferred generator for deploying to OSX 10.9?

I’m currently looking into the OSX Bundle generator, however, our application ships with multiple executables and a number of dependent libraries and frameworks, so I’m not quite sure whether this is the right way to go. From what I’ve read, OSX application bundles are supposed to have a single executable only – how would I go about deploying an application that has multiple component applications? If we use the bundle generator, our application is going to look like this (I think), which seems strange:

OurApplication.app/
    Contents/
        Info.plist
        MacOS/
            executable1
        Frameworks/
            QtCore.framework
            QtGui.framework
            …
        Resources/
            bin/
                executable1
                executable2
                …
            lib/
                non-framework dependencies

Thanks for your help,

Lachlan Hetherton
Software Engineer (Visualisation)
☎ +613-9545-8041


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