Adding dynamic libraries to a macosx application bundle

CLAM team is now geared toward having again MacOSX binary distribution. We are learning how things in Mac works and it is being a long process. At last it seems that we are getting enough insight. Until now, our Mac packages for CLAM applications depended on the installation of another bundle with clam and third party libraries. Following the advice of Volker Schumacher this would be more handy by having, as we have in windows, all third party libraries within the handle. So we used otool and install_name_tool as the mac developer documentation says. But CLAM has a lot of third party dependencies which are recursive and this was a very hard problem to do it by hand, so Pau and me pair programmed a handy python script which eases the process a lot.

What it does is firstly using otool to retrieve all the dependencies recursively and removes system ones. Then it copies all them to the bundle, changes their id and then changes all cross references among libraries and applications accordantly.

The script is available on the CLAM svn repository. A SCons tool is also work in progress. I will wrote more on int when finished.

BBQed onion springs and Tux evangelism

Last Saturday I could not attend an interesting meeting in Barcelona for the startup of a new organization which has the goal of compensating the increasing privative software lobbing over our autonomous government in Catalonia. I was not able to go because I scheduled for the same day, a typical Catalan BBQ like event, a Calçotada. Anyway I still used that other event to promote Tux cause ;-)

Why? Because my Linux laptop was the jukebox for the event. As result I got some of my friends using Amarok to choose the music they wanted and they liked much the program. Even those that declared themselves completely newbies with computers managed to get some of their music playing. I also activated Beryl which impressed them a lot.

Free CD's to Mario's Pub, chatting about cool linux features... Anything as effective as seeing it running and managing it. When I told them that that was Linux they all said comfortable comments such 'so, it is not as difficult as people says' and 'it's like windows but cooler!'.

Some of my friends asked me to install Kubuntu on his desktop computer. I told one of them to do it yesterday but, sincerely we were too hangover. I must say there were more things in there than Linux evangelism. And pretty funny ones.