Mac OSX installer for dmd

[Michel Fortin]

On 2010-08-04 15:31:32 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> said:

> Michel Fortin wrote:
>> As a side note, my D plugin for Xcode expects DMD to be available at 
>> /usr/local/bin/{dmd,dmd1,dmd2} and the runtime libraries should be in 
>> /usr/local/lib. It won't work if the files can't be found there, 
>> although I might change that if an official distribution of DMD 
>> installs itself elsewhere.
> 
> To me, the biggest problem is deciding where the files should go. There 
> doesn't seem to be any consensus or culture in OS X about this.

I agree. It took me quite a while to decide to do things as I did. The 
goals were:

1. It should be easy to manually replace DMD from a new package from 
Digital Mars.
2. It should work on the command line with no user intervention (no 
need to add something to $PATH in the bash profile for instance).
3. It should not mess with the system directories.

Except when it come from third party package managers (fink, MacPorts), 
most Unix software not coming from Apple installs in /usr/local on Mac 
OS X (for instance I have: MySQL, Git, Mercurial, Doxygen, 7za and a 
couple others there). So it makes a lot of sense to install it there.

To make manual replacement easy, I wanted to preserve the dmd and dmd2 
directories from the zip archive intact, so it's easy to swap them for 
another one. Initially, I decided to use /usr/local/dmd and 
/usr/local/dmd2, and add with symlinks in /usr/local/{bin,lib,man} to 
make everything work from the command line without changing $PATH.

Symlinks didn't work quite well: dmd takes the value of args[0] to know 
which directory to search for dmd.conf. I guess I could have installed 
a dmd.conf in /etc/ to override that, but then how do you install dmd1 
and dmd2 side by side? So what I did is replace the symlinks with a 
sort of trampoline program that adjusts the value of the args[0] for 
the path of the DMD just before calling exec(), allowing a different 
dmd.conf to be used for each one.

And using /usr/local/{dmd,dmd2} wasn't entirely satisfactory either. 
Mac OS X hides the /usr folder when you browse using the Finder. So 
replacing /usr/local/{dmd,dmd2} manually with a newer one isn't as 
straightforward as it should be. I settled on using 
/Library/Compilers/{dmd,dmd2}. This isn't entirely satisfactory either 
since it doesn't follow UNIX ways, but it's not too far of how Mac OS X 
is packaged and I told myself it'd be easier to support users that way.

Now, the only missing piece for an easy manual replacement of DMD is a 
zip archive where the executable bit is set.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/