Hi @seppeldue-
Sorry, I wish I had more experience with pkg installers. There may be other plugin developers in this forum who might be able to help, should you desire to.
It seems to me that all that is needed, is to copy the .rhp files to the MacPlugIns Folder
That is the desired end result, yes, from a technical perspective.
so i just wrote a one line bash script to copy the files and than used a little program named “Platypus”
I believe this should work. Apple will required that this app be Notarized if you want to avoid the Gatekeeper (System Integrity Protection) messages regarding it being potential malware, but that requirement would be in place anyway, so the point is moot.
Maybe you can give me some feedback on it.
Sure. There are some potential downsides - however minor you deem them - that may shed light on the - potentially minor - advantages of .macrhi:
- the path might change to the plugin folder. Your installer would need to be updated; whereas with a macrhi, we would handle that at install time.
- there is no association between your installer and Rhino (pkg and dmg have the same disadvantage); whereas with macrhi, that extension is associated with our app so it handles launching and executing.
but those are the only two I can think of off the top of my head. Executing an arbitrary shell script is “less-than-kosher” from a security perspective, but I fully understand that sometimes this is necessary (we’ve done it ourselves to work around certain “limitations” of macOS).
Is ther some documentation on .macrhi ?
No. In fact, I had to look at source to remind myself what it’s really doing and it’s not terribly elaborate. It’s decompressing it, making sure it’s a properly formatted rhp/dll package and moving it to the right location (along with the above advantages).
.macrhi is far from perfect. Someday, we would like to have a cross-platform rhi installer, but we’ve put far more effort into a package manager (which is they way you might want to go in the future anyway.).