[Vm-dev] News about bundling VM (Mac users mostly)

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 2012-06-21, at 18:55, Igor Stasenko wrote:

> On 21 June 2012 18:45, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>> 
>> On 2012-06-21, at 18:25, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>>> 
>>> - changed the VM bundle directory layout: now all external plugins
>>> and dlls are stored in Contents/Plugins subdir,
>>> instead of Contents/Resources as before (see screenshot attached)
>>> - changed the external plugin search logic to search this Plugins dir
>>> instead of Resources
>> 
>> Very nice! However, what's the reason you did not put the plugins in the MacOS folder? That way a multi-platform all-in-one bundle would have only one subdirectory per platform.
>> 
> 
> Do you think it is important detail?
> I thought bundles live and die on macs.. so why caring putting it there?
> For iOS, we can use absolutely different layout , and for non-mac
> platforms it is completely unrelated...
> 
> I don't know much about bundle convention(s).. but to what i have
> seen, they look a bit arbitrary
> (i browsed multiple .app bundles).
> 
> So, if you (and others) think plugins should be under MacOS subdir, it
> will be easy to change that,
> before we put VM in use.


I care about the Squeak all-in-one directory layout. On a Mac you won't see the bundle contents, but on other platforms you do.  So there is e.g. Contents/MacOS, Contents/Linux-i686, etc. And because the Linux-i686 directory has the VM and all the Linux plugins, it would appear consistent if Contents/MacOS had all the Mac plugins, too.

It's not a big deal really, and the most important is to have them out of Contents/Resources, but it would seem nicer if they were in the MacOS directory.

Possibly, instead of hard-coding the path, the plugin location could be an Info.plist entry, just like we have entries for e.g. the SqueakTrustedDirectory and SqueakUnTrustedDirectory.

On a related note, it would be helpful to users if we could hide the Windows plugins in a subdirectory, too. They clutter up the root of the all-in-one considerably.

- Bert -