investigating possibility of macOS app

[dehesselle]

Hello @teamcons ,

we've been talking in the GTK chat previously. I am able to build jorts, but trying to launch it gives me this:

rene@Betelgeuse src % /Users/Shared/work/jhb-1.3/bin/io.github.elly_code.jorts

** (io.github.elly_code.jorts:52149): CRITICAL **: 12:31:49.086: Settings.vala:114: Could not connect: No such file or directory

** (io.github.elly_code.jorts:52149): CRITICAL **: 12:31:49.086: Settings.vala:193: Could not connect: No such file or directory

** (io.github.elly_code.jorts:52149): WARNING **: 12:31:49.104: Settings.vala:137: Cannot spawn a message bus without a machine-id: Unable to load /Users/Shared/work/jhb-1.3/var/lib/dbus/machine-id or /etc/machine-id: Failed to open file “/Users/Shared/work/jhb-1.3/var/lib/dbus/machine-id”: No such file or directory

🎉✨ ACTIVATING: SUPER COOL JORTS 😎🔥❗🎶🤌
Your Notes are all belong to us!
      _       _
    (\o/)   (\o/)    <--- Tiny electric angels working in the background
     /_\     /_\

Please wait while the app remembers all the things...
zsh: segmentation fault  /Users/Shared/work/jhb-1.3/bin/io.github.elly_code.jorts

If dbus is an integral part of this app, I won't be able to take this any further. I haven't seen any (self-contained) macOS app in the wild that uses/bundles dbus and I am not going to figure it out. But that doesn't mean you're stranded: dbus is in Homebrew and there are ways to make it work, but it won't be the "it just works out of the box"-experience that people would come to expect (and still out of scope for what I can offer to do).

[teamcons]

Hi! Thank you for investigating.
There is no Settings.vala, and i am not using the one from Granite, so i am not sure where this one comes from
It uses GSettings to handle user preferences, maybe it comes from there? Does this ring a bell for you?

Another venue by which there may be some Dbus is commandline handling. When a new instance spawns, it checks whether Jorts is already running (the DBus name is already taken), hands in the commandline arguments and self destructs. I am not sure how to get around this, it seems to be the standard for GTK (but you probably know better)

[dehesselle]

Settings.vala is part of granite, i.e. lib/Widgets/Settings.vala. The first two messages are about asking the accounts service for the user name via GLIb's dbus api.

GTK has no hard dependency on dbus. I maintain multiple macOS ports of GTK apps, none of them require dbus. But I do know that what you're doing isn't unusual - it's just part of an ecosystem that is underdeveloped on macOS.

[teamcons]

Okay sorry i was looking at the wrong Settings.
Found the culprit in the code

jorts/src/Application.vala

Line 83 in 7a0471e

Granite.init ();

jorts/src/Application.vala

Line 108 in 7a0471e

var granite_settings = Granite.Settings.get_default ();

jorts/src/Application.vala

Line 118 in 7a0471e

granite_settings.notify["prefers-color-scheme"].connect (() => {

Thats very easily fixable. The application dont even need that.
The only point of this is to follow system dark/light mode. I can gate it behind a compile option / just bin it since Jorts goes by its own rules for theming.

Do you build from a macOS machine? Or do you set some parameter?
the segfault is because of dbus/the Settings thing or did i misunderstand?

[dehesselle]

I build on macOS, yes. I'm hoping that the settings-related errors are the cause of the segfault, but I don't know yet. The first instance tries to determine the user's path and I'm guessing that this is crucial (settings, data, ...). If that segfault turns out to be unrelated, a deeper investigation is necessary.

Can you open a "macos" branch here where you push fixes/workaround like the ones you just found? Doesn't have to be pretty yet, just to help to push this further along.

[teamcons]

Here it is

#115