Question: experience with bower on macos?

[hgvhgv]

Does anyone have any experience building and using bower on macos? I'd like to give it a try, but I'm new to mercury and wanted to see if anyone has any tips before I build the mercury compiler. Thanks!

[wangp]

Seems like homebrew has binary packages for Mercury, so you could try that.

[hgvhgv]

Sorry, I certainly meant to check homebrew before asking this (and thought I had)! So sorry for the unnecessary ping. I got it all up and running pretty fast with only two small hiccups (recorded here in case others come looking):

1. needed to put the homebrew version of ncurses libraries in my path (explained in the homebrew ncurses info)
2. in the Makefile, @ln -L -f bower ../bower includes an option not on macos: ln -L. But it didn't seem necessary to me and worked fine to remove it.

Anyway, thanks for pointing out my mistake and for the software! I've very excited to dive in.

[hgvhgv]

Wow just want to say bower is so great, thanks so much. I've used many different notmuch fronts (alot, notmuch emacs, neomutt) and bower is just so clear, concise, and effective. Thanks!

[wangp]

No problem, that's nice to hear.

Regarding the ln command, the -L option is there for the case when bower is a symlink to the real executable. This doesn't happen in the default configuration, but for development I have this in Mercury.params:

MCFLAGS+= --use-grade-subdirs

It appears the FreeBSD/macOS version of ln may follow symlinks by default?

[hgvhgv]

Understood! I couldn't figure out why the executable wouldn't be in the main directory based on a quick skim. (Figuring out how core utils on macos differ from linux [and even sometimes current FreeBSD] is often a fun but impossible sidequest!)

Is there a better place (IRC, discord, otherwise) to ask basic questions about bower than the issue queue? I don't want to clog it with simple queries.

[wangp]

Well, there's this thing called email :) If there's interest, we could open up the Github Discussions maybe. I haven't used it before.

[hgvhgv]

Thanks for email offer! I think Github Discussions could be good---it always seems like a good idea to keep answered questions public for later searchers. But maybe traffic here is low enough that you don't mind plain queries in the issue queue (certain maintainers seem to want it for real issues only, e.g., bug reports and workable feature proposals).

If you decide to open the Discussions, I'll ask my questions there; otherwise I'll open issues here.