[Pythonmac-SIG] Private frameworks - BINGO!

[Mark Day]

On Friday, August 23, 2002, at 01:22 PM, Jack Jansen wrote:

> Just after sending my previous mail I though I'd have a look at how 
> OmniGraffle links to its frameworks (by using "otool -l"), and it uses 
> the "@executable_path/../Frameworks/" construct we've discussed here 
> before.

I wonder if you could make the frameworks be a peer of the top-level 
applications, and put enough "../"s in the the above path?  So, a tree 
looking like:
Python 2.3/
Python 2.3/Frameworks/
...
Python 2.3/PythonIDE.app/
...

Presumably, the user could move the whole Python 2.3 folder around, but 
can't move the items inside the folder unless the frameworks were in 
one of the standard locations.

But when would you move/copy the frameworks to one of the standard 
locations?  Via some menu item in the interpretter or IDE?  Ask them on 
first launch if they're "just trying it out" or "I'm hooked; keep it 
around for me" (probably too annoying)?

> We could solve this be sprinkling symlinks all over the place, but I'm 
> not sure I like that....

Not all volume formats support symlinks.  For example, they couldn't 
copy to their iDisk on WebDAV, or DOS FAT, or SMB.  But then again, 
don't packages currently require symlinks (eg., for the "Current" 
version to point to the actual version that is current).  Sigh.

> Hmm, maybe it isn't such a good idea after all. But feel free to 
> ponder about it and come up with nifty solutions....

Could there be a runnable version of the apps on a disk image?  They 
could try it out by running from the disk image.  Could it then be 
installed without needing yet another copy of the image?  I suppose 
once the user has copied the application to a writable volume, you 
could just move the frameworks to a standard spot automatically.

-Mark