> On Sep 2, 2020, at 9:04 AM, Andy Herrick <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Yes - environment variables are not a good answer for this, not just mac, but
> even on windows the env variables at run time are different if launched from
> a shell (the env variables of that shell) vs. when run from a shortcut (the
> system-wide or user env variables set in Control Panel or Settings dialog).
>
> JEP-343 says jpackage should be "a tool for packaging self-contained Java
> applications.", so an app packaged with jpackage should run on a machine
> without requiring any other files to be installed . That should not prohibit
> optional configuration from being discovered on a machine and used to tune
> the application or it's use of Java.
>
> Normally, any such discovery can be done by the application itself, except
> where it is the the java options that tune the java vm itself, and that is
> why we are considering mechanisms (such as expanding environment variables at
> runtime, or reading an installed configuration file of some kind)
>
It’s difficult and was difficult with java applications on OS X from the start
to have an application support anything like command line invoking with
parameters.
Maybe add standalone options for the command that update an existing
application bundle? Of course then there would probably be signing and other
issues.
Again, for LSEnvironment on OS X I think it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to
implement. You could handle it something like it appears file associations
work. Although, I haven’t done anything with those yet. Then just modify the
Info.plist. I have had code that does that in the past. XML right?
In the past I have had need to add environment variables to my application to
interface it with the R language. Also debugging AppleScript related at one
point required environment variables. It was very much an OS X only java app at
one point in time.
Recently I had problems interfacing to Anaconda python that it seemed like
being able to set the PATH variable might resolve. Although my own attempts to
set the variables to get it to work failed. What did work was command line
shell invoking the application. Like myApp.app/Contents/MacOS/myApp from
Terminal. That was for someone else’s application.
I decided just to set a alias for that in .bash_profile for my own use and not
try to figure what exactly the Finder launched application needed to make it
work.
So these are some use cases where environment variables were involved. A
feature to support them could occasionally be nice.
