I'd like to broaden the discussion a bit, by introducing another class of
.app's which I think we might have in the future: Foo.app which provides
an Aqua interface to some open-source package (which itself depends on
many other packages) that can be installed by Fink.  In this case, I
would argue that some kind of interaction with Fink is desirable, because
Foo.app would want to query the Debian database when it is being installed,
and on the other hand, we would want Fink to complain about removing the
dependent packages if Foo.app was still installed.

I don't know how to solve the problem of users moving a Foo.app around,
but I have an idea about it (which you are welcome to shoot holes in).
Foo.app gets installed with Debian tools, and the installation includes
a file in some specific location in the /sw heierarchy which the user
*won't* move.  We use that file as Fink's record that the package has
been installed, and we ask that Foo.app should upon startup, check for
the existence of that file and if it's not present, quit with a warning
to the user to reinstall the Fink package.  (The binary which does that
shouldn't be linked to any Fink-installed libraries, of course, so its
some kind of wrapper around the program itself.)  On the other hand,
if the user tries to remove the Fink package and the .app itself can't
be found, the user could be given a warning that Foo.app hasn't been
removed but won't function anymore, and that the user ought to find it
and remove it.

OK, maybe not so elegant, but I hope the point is clear.

If you guys agree that there is some class of .app's which are appropriate
for Fink, then we can ask whether OroborOSX and FinkCommander qualify.
Neither one is quite as closely linked to Fink as I have described above,
but both would be very useful to Fink users, and perhaps the method I
outlined above could provide a way to make Fink packages for them.

  -- Dave

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