[Starkit] Tclkit and Mac OS X 10.4

[Jean-Claude Wippler]

Daniel A. Steffen wrote:

> presumably double-clicked .kit was handled by my Launcher app in  
> 10.3 ? are the .kit files still bound to Launcher in 10.4 ?  
> otherwise you may have to reassociate them manually to Launcher  
> (via the Finder Info window), maybe because something else on the  
> system now claims .kit by default ? maybe Wishkit.app has become  
> associated to .kit directly ? (why/how though?)

I don't know how/why, but re-associating .kit files with Launcher  
solved it for me.  Double-clicking now launches WishKit and things work.

What I did was select a .kit file, then ctrl/click and select the  
Open With... popup menu, then point to /Applications/Utilities/ 
Launcher and enable the "Always Open With" flag, then do a "Get Info"  
on the starkit and make sure Open With is Launcher, and lastly  
"Change All..." to make all starkits open that way.  Not sure it's  
all needed, but in 10.4 I had some troubles at times to make such  
settings really "stick".

> note that Launcher writes diagnostic output to console.log, so if  
> it is indeed Launcher that is starting wishkit the log will have  
> the exact arguments it passes along, but as it doesn't pass any - 
> psn* arguments, the fact that you got this above makes me suspect  
> that .kit somehow launched Wishkit.app directly.
>
> can't test in Tiger here right now, I'll try to investigate this  
> next time I reboot my box into Tiger, but it'll be a few days...
>
> BTW, for the 8.4.10 BI, I'm switching the Launcher association  
> for .kit to 'tclkit' directly, as this is now the new aqua tclkit  
> (there is also a tclkit-X11 and a wish-X11 now); wishkit is no  
> longer really needed (but may still be useful because it can have  
> an icon and tclkit-aqua can't)

Cool.  The benefit I see for tclkit-aqua, is that it's a single file  
exe, which developer can use to create "standard" starpacks with from  
other platforms (using sdx's "-runtime" option), while still getting  
an Aqua executable with no dependency on X11.  Having .kit files  
launch it too means the default becomes the best one for non-techie  
deployment targets.

Does this depend on Launcher?  Can we come up with a shell script (or  
some other trick) to avoid the dependency on a binary which is not  
pre-installed on Mac OS X?  It's no big deal btw, because tclkit  
itself also needs to be installed.  On Windows, sdx generates a  
mystarkit.bat file when wrapping, though I'm not sure that gets used  
much.

-jcw