I've made a first attempt at a .app launcher for git-annex webapp for OSX, please see https://github.com/jcftang/git-annex/commits/master the icon needs to be resized and made to look nicer at somepoint, the launcher assumes that git-annex is in the run time path.

I would imagine it might be possible to fiddle with the paths and get all the needed components into the .app file for OSX users.

Aha! I had been fumbling trying to find the right way to do this. Looks very promising. Found the documentation for the file format: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/General/Reference/InfoPlistKeyReference/Articles/CoreFoundationKeys.html

Where do I install this thing? If I put the git-annex.app directory inside ~/Desktop/, will that put it on the user's desktop?

Could you make a screenshot?

I'm guessing that the NSAppleScriptEnabled is not needed, and perhaps the LSMinimumSystemVersionByArchitecture block could also be removed.

Comment by http://joeyh.name/ Sun Sep 23 15:14:20 2012
Also, is there any global location I can install it when installing as root?
Comment by http://joeyh.name/ Sun Sep 23 15:17:42 2012

The .app file can be placed anywhere, typically you would want to bundle it in a .dmg file for the user and the user just "drags" it to the /Applications folder. It should be possible to bundle statically linked binaries inside the .app bundle, you might end up having to ship parts of coreutils and a few other applications to make it self contained.

Anyhow, here is a quick screencast http://screencast.com/t/pnk8bk3hyUJM and a screengrab of the app http://screencast.com/t/4jjeRFx4g

Thinking this out a little, I reckon the script MacOS/git-annex could be a bit more clever and get the basedir/basename of where it app is and execute git-annex from the .app bundle, then you wouldn't need to install it as root at all. It would require a bit of work to collect the executables needed.

Also, I just quickly checked my Lion install, it seems to come with git and uuidgen once xcode and the command line tools are installed.

For now I have it generating the shell script, so it contains the path to whereever git-annex's binary is actually installed.

For root, the app is installed in /Applications/ , for non-root installs I put it in ~/Desktop/

Comment by http://joeyh.name/ Sun Sep 23 16:29:19 2012
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