| 23 Feb 2026 |
 rebmit[reb] | In reply to @samasaur:matrix.org
do we have a standard recommendation for how to handle meta.mainProgram/nix run compatibility for packages that produce an app bundle? I've seen:
- symlinking the binary to
$out/bin via something like ln -s $out/{Applications/${name}.app/Contents/MacOS/${name},bin/}
- using
makeBinaryWrapper to do something similar
- putting a wrapper script in
$out/bin that calls open -na on the produced application bundle
Is one of these unambiguously "better" than the others? I recall the symlink approach having issues (and I can find comments in nixpkgs and on PRs to that extent), so makeBinaryWrapper seems better than that for not a lot of overhead. I vaguely recall some cases where even that approach doesn't work (properly), and see some examples in nixpkgs (libreoffice, mongodb-compass, beekeeper-studio, jetbrains, tigervnc) using open instead, but that has some other behavioral differences (such as exiting in the terminal immediately, unless we standardize on using -W). Maybe there isn't a universal right answer, but I feel like it'd be helpful to have docs either way
an example of symlink causing behavior differences I ran into recently: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/489364 | 06:55:25 |
 samasaur | yea that's what prompted me to ask, i have the zotero, cinny, and nheko PRs up in tabs rn | 06:56:06 |
 toonn | Each of those approaches has more overhead than the last is worth mentioning. | 08:25:20 |
| toonn | Maybe also the fact that them not working might be of interest to upstream. | 08:26:27 |
 Ben Sparks | consider not setting a meta.mainProgram, then providing script aliases that point at the executables of that bundle | 11:22:13 |
| Ben Sparks | let multiOutputBundle = stdenv.mkDerivation { ... }; let singleProg = writers.makeShellScript { "${multiOutputBundle}/bin/$MY-SINGLE-PROGRAM $@" } | 11:23:52 |
| Ben Sparks | something like this perhaps? | 11:23:57 |
| rebmit[reb] | In reply to @benjaminsparks:chat.alugha.app
consider not setting a meta.mainProgram, then providing script aliases that point at the executables of that bundle i don't get it, your example seems pretty similar to using a (shell) wrapper | 11:35:44 |
| Ben Sparks | except that you don't rebuild the multiOutputBundle when you use overrideAttrs to make a new meta.mainProgram for each program | 11:36:25 |
| Ben Sparks | ahh im sorry i have misread the message 😄 is what I have written even helpful to you, probably not 😂 | 11:37:33 |
