I’m trying to package a Java program I wrote so it makes a nice, professional-looking “clickable” app, complete with a custom icon.<\/p>\n
First up was the Mac. The Oracle-furnished packaging tools were buggy and did not exactly work as documented, but I finally managed to make a (crappy) package from them.<\/p>\n
Then came Linux. At first I was at a loss as to what to do, then I decided to crib the package bundler that the jEdit<\/a> build files used. It was a huge struggle, because it was your typical open-source project, almost completely undocumented. Eventually I managed to get it to limp along to completion and make a (nonworking) Debian package.<\/p>\n A day of struggle followed, trying to make the nonworking package work. Eventually I gave up on the bundler and decided to make a Debian package completely from scratch. That was surprisingly easy compared to the crap software I had been fighting with.<\/p>\n Then back to the Mac. Would the bundler that the jEdit team used do any better a job than the stock one shipped with the JDK? No, it would not. So I looked into what made a Mac application bundle tick, and it wasn’t that complex<\/a>. The biggest hurdles were (a) finding the magic keyword to search on (“bundle” in this case), and creating an Info.plist<\/code> file (doable once I located the documentation<\/a> for them).<\/p>\n