Many people want to package their .NET application for Mac OS X. And above all, they want the experience to be painless, which means that they want to ship an application that runs, whether Mono is installed or not.
The process of packaging a .NET application for Mac OS X basically follows 4 steps:
- Getting .NET dependencies of the .NET executable
- Generating a native loader that will embed all the .NET assemblies (.NET executable and .NET dependencies)
- Getting native dependencies of the native executable
- Relocating all the stuff so library loading goes well
The process can be even more complicated if you are using reflection, dynamically discovered library and so on. So let's keep thing simple.
Getting .NET dependencies
This is the easy part. You just have to find recursively all the .NET dependencies of the .NET executable. As every .NET assembly contains its references, it is trivial.
Generating a native loader
The native loader generation is simplified by the fact that Mono allows .NET assemblies to be loaded from embedded binary streams. So for every .NET assembly, we generate a binary array and use the magical functions of Mono. If there are configuration files to embed, the process is the same.
Getting native dependencies
Once the native loader is compiled, the otool command can give us all the native dependencies. So we gather all the native library needed to run our application. But on Mac OS X, the dynamic loading is based on paths recorded in each native library. This is the point of the next step.
Relocating all the stuff
This is the tougher part of the packaging. Now that you have all the native dependencies, you must be sure that you only have unique dependencies. Why, because we you gather dependencies, you can find either specific version of a library or compatibility version of a library. Failing to make these reference unique can lead to unexpected behavior (mostly cryptic crashes). That where the otool command is useful as the first line always contains the specific version of a library, even if run against a compatibility version symbolic link. Then the install_name is used to change absolute path to relative path containing the macro @executable_path.
Packaging made easy
All this steps can be tedious and error prone. That's why, in the Monobjc, the packaging is done by a NAnt task: <mkbundle/> (you can find its options on this page). This task can handle most of the need for .NET application packaging in a truly simple way. And as a bonus, this task is not linked to the Monobjc bridge, so you can use it even if you don't use the Monobjc bridge.
