Re: [fluid-dev] Spreading fluidsynth as binary

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

Felix Krause wrote:
> Hi,
> I am developing an application that uses fluidsynth. I want to spread it as
> binary for Windows and MacOSX. As for Windows, there seems to be no problem
> with simply spreading the fluidsynth.exe and the fluidsynth.dll along with
> my application. But on MacOSX, this doesn't work. I already figured out
> that the destination system needs to have midishare installed. On my Mac,
> fluidsynth works of course, because I compiled and installed it on this
> system. But I don't have a second Mac for testing purposes, so all I know
> is that fluidsynth doesn't simply run on another Mac by copying the binary
> and installing midishare.
>
> Can someone provide information about what whether - and how - it is
> possible to spread fluidsynth as binary for Mac? The target user group of
> my application won't probably be able to build fluidsynth from source,
> that's why I need to spread it as binary.
>
> Cheers,
> Felix

Hi Felix,

I'm not sure to fully understand your problem. In Windows you can install a 
dynamic library (DLL) in two ways: first, as a private library, when you 
place the library at the same directory of the executable using it. This is 
how QSynth setup package installs fluidsynth.dll and also the Qt4 libraries. 
The second way is system-wide, when you install the libraries somewhere in 
the system PATH. Any program can access the libraries installed in this way, 
with the advantage of saving disk space, and the drawback of possible 
DLL-hell problems, when another setup package replaces an existing library 
with another version.

In Mac OSX the first approach of installing the libraries at the same 
directory of the executable doesn't automatically work. As a workaround, you 
can set the environment variable DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH pointing to the directory  
before running the program. 

I think that the best solution would be to properly package Fluidsynth, maybe 
as a Fink package, and also the applications depending on it. Not sure why 
there is not a Fluidsynth package in Fink yet.

Regards,
Pedro