[Geany-Devel] OSX ports?

[Jiří Techet]

Hi Chris,

On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 8:09 AM, Chris H <spamless at 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
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