<bsmedberg> Is this a decent place to ask questions about application bundles and launch services?

<mikeash> I wouldn’t call it decent, “wretched hive of scum and villainy” is more appropriate

[snip]

<bsmedberg> Is there some way to run /foo/bar-executable but tell launch services to pretend that it’s running as part of /bar/MyApp.app ?

<mikeash> “as part of”?

<bsmedberg> Basically, I want to stick a “runtime executable” in /Library/XUL.framework/Versions/<foo>/xulrunner-bin

<bsmedberg> sorry, /Library/Frameworks/…

<arwyn> so you want to have your normal app bundle in /bar/MyApp, but you want the actual executable file to be from /Library/XUL.framework,e tc?

<bsmedberg> And when a user runs /bar/XULApplication.app it will have a little stub binary at Contents/MacOS/xulrunner-stub

* arwyn suggests a symlink

<mikeash> that sure sounds like odd design

<mikeash> I *think* that if your app’s main executable just execs the other one, it’ll work, but I’ve never tried it and I’m nowhere near sure

<bsmedberg> it doesn’t work to execv the other one :-(

<arwyn> what doesn’t work?

<bsmedberg> the xulrunner-bin doesn’t get menus/dock icon (can’t activate the window)

<arwyn> and to be clear, we are talking about exec() the system call… not relaunching via LS

<bsmedberg> correct

<mikeash> does xulrunner-bin work properly when it’s actually the main executable of your app?

<bsmedberg>yes

<arwyn> in your exec(), did you preserve the original argv[] parameters so that the OS will think the bundle is still located in the right place?

<bsmedberg> as long as all the rest of the XUL framework is along with it

<bsmedberg> arwyn: no, I didn’t… does the OS use the argv[0] to determine the bundle?

* bsmedberg gets excited

<arwyn> yes, there is no other way

<bsmedberg> cool, I’ll try that, thanks

<mikeash> arwyn, aren’t there undocumented ways, like env(“_”) or something?

<arwyn> I know this type of re-exec() trick can work, people on this channel have done it

<arwyn> it might just need some tweaking

<mikeash> I think that Firefox does it

<bsmedberg> well, no

<bsmedberg> Firefox execs itself, but it’s the same binary

* bsmedberg wrote that code

<arwyn> heh

<mikeash> I don’t think that being the same binary is going to magically make it work, and being a different binary is going to magically make it break

<arwyn> mike, maybe… I’m not entirely sure

<arwyn> binary doesn’t matter at all, its all paths & args

<mikeash> arwyn, anyway, irrelevant since Apple does apparently use argv[0]

<arwyn> argv is accessible via the NSGetArgv() stuff in Libc, which is what CF/NS uses to get it later to do main bundling

<mikeash> I can’t even think of a way that LS could even detect that you’ve re-exec’d, much less figure out whether you re-exec’d the same binary or a different one

[snip a long discussion that I didn’t understand about how the Mac OS could do this differently if it really wanted to]