Hi Chris,

On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Chris H <spamless@xmail.net> wrote:

Quoting Chris H :
Apologies, my mailer truncated my message...
>
> Greetings,
> Sorry if this has been asked in the past. I've attempted to find similar
> topics in the
> list archive. But to no avail. The link on Geany's MailingList page
> (http://news.gmane.org/gmane.editors.geany.devel)
> to search the archives returns 404.
> So my question is; are there any issues building on OSX? I'm currently
> maintaining over 100 ports on FreeBSD,
> and use Geany for most of my work, but have recently taken an interest in
> OSX, and now feel handicapped without
> it (Geany). While I see that you provide a link to an OSX dmg image for
> OSX, It's 64bit only, and is limited to
10.7 or greater. What I'd like to do, is create a universal binary that coveres the
whole gambit (10.*). So I guess my question is;
1) Does Geany compile on OSX out of the box?

No, it doesn't. Geany depends on GTK and transitively on lots of other open source libraries which aren't part of OS X. It's not enough to build just Geany - you have to build all these dependencies and add them into the bundle.

I use

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GTK+/OSX

to build Geany and make a bundle. Geany has also been extended with the "integration" part to better integrate to OS X to support things like global menus etc. The detailed build process is described here:

https://github.com/geany/geany-osx

OS X 10.7 is by default the oldest version supported by GTK-OSX but I believe there's some way to support older systems too (I believe there was some problem with changed binary format and linking). The question is whether supporting such old systems is worth it - OS X 10.7 isn't supported even by Apple and doesn't receive security patches and IMO nobody should use it.

Building 386 binaries is somehow possible too with GTK-OSX but again, we are talking about 10 year old computers running unsupported operating system versions. Besides, this would about double the bundle size (which currently is about 60MB because all the dependencies have to be inside) and in addition I don't have to any 386 Mac to test which is why I decided not to support these.

2) If not, is there already any work on this I might expand on, rather than re-invent the wheel?
FWIW I evaluated MacPorts, but found it less than ideal, and upon further evaluation, found
HomeBrew a better candidate.

Neither MacPorts nor HomeBrew are suitable - I tried both. The problem is you don't want to create just a command-line version of the app - you want it to behave like a standard GUI application with global menu, clickable icon in the launcher, being able to drag files to the icon to open them etc. These things aren't possible with MacPorts or HomeBrew (in addition I believe HomeBrew doesn't have GTK built with Quartz backend and only provides X backend so there's no support of retina displays).

For MacPorts Geany version there's a wiki page here

https://wiki.geany.org/howtos/osx/running

There's no similar description for HomeBrew but from what I tried, it runs fine but with the mentioned X backend and all the limitations above.

Cheers,

Jiri