OSX Bundling Soprano and other joys

Libferris has been moving to use more Qt/KDE technologies over the years. Ferris is also a fairly substantial software project in it's own right, with many plugins and support for multiple libraries. Years back I moved from using raw redland to using soprano for RDF handling in libferris.

Over recent months, from time to time, I've been working on an OSX bundle for libferris. The idea is to make installation as simple as copying Ferris.app to /Applications. I've done some OSX packaging before, so I've been exposed to the whole library paths inside dylib stuff, and also the freedesktop specs expecting things in /etc or whatever and you really want it to look into /Applications/YouApp/Contents/Resources/.../etc/whatever.

The silver test for packaging is to rename the area that is used to build the source to something unexpected and see if you can still run the tools. The Gold test is obviously to install from the app.dmz onto a fresh machine and see that it runs.

I discovered a few gotchas during silver testing and soprano usage. If you get things half right then you can get to a state that allows the application to run but that does not allow a redland RDF model to ever be created. If your application assumes that it can always create an in memory RDF store, a fairly secure bet really, then bad things will befall the app bundle on osx.

Plugins are found by searching for the desktop files first and then loading the shared libary plugin as needed. The desktop files can be found with the first line below, while the second line allows the plugin shared libraries to be found and loaded.

export SOPRANO_DIRS=/Applications/Ferris.app/Contents/Resources/usr/share
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/Ferris.app/Contents/Resources/usr/local/lib/soprano/

You have to jump through a few more hoops. You'll find that the plugin ./lib/soprano/libsoprano_redlandbackend.so links to lib/librdf.0.dylib and librdf will link to other redland libraries which themselves link to things like libxml2 which you might not have bundled yet.

There are also many cases of things linking to QtCore and other Qt libraries. These links are normally to nested paths like Library/Frameworks/QtCore.framework/Versions/4/QtCore which will not pass the silver test. Actually, links inside dylibs like that tend to cause the show to segv and you are left to work out where and why that happened. My roll by hand solution is to create softlinks to these libraries like QtCore in the .../lib directory and then resolve the dylib links to these softlinks.

In the end I'd also like to make an app bundle for specific KDE apps. Just being able to install okular by drag and drop would be very handy. It is my preferred reader for PDF files and having a binary that doesn't depend on a build environment (homebrew or macports) makes it simpler to ensure I can always have okular even when using an osx machine.