Mono(macpack)

💖 Mono(macpack) — bestie edition 💖

okay so you found the macpack page in the Mono manual, and honestly? you're about to have the cutest little bundle-building era of your life. this is the whole thing, top to bottom, no skips, no cap. 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

macpack — Macintosh OS X Packager for managed gui assemblies

like, it packs. it's for Macs. it handles managed gui assemblies. the name is literally the whole personality. 👑

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

macpack [options] assembly

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so macpack is the tool you use to package managed assemblies — the kind that need gui availability to even exist, think System.Windows.Forms or Cocoa# — so they can actually be deployed on Mac OS X. ✨

what it does is take your assembly plus whatever resources you hand it and prep a whole OS X–compatible bundle out of them. that bundle ships with the assembly you specified and every resource you passed in (you pass those with the -resource: switch, more on that below 💅).

and here's the fun part: you get to tell it what kind of app you're making using the -mode: argument. that's the dial that controls how the environment inside the Mono class libraries gets set up. it's giving main character energy for your build config. 🫶

💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -a assembly — this tells macpack where the managed assembly you wanna bundle is chilling. also, if you're doing an X11/Gtk# application, this is what points at the shell script to launch. and ngl, this is exactly the same as just passing the assembly as a plain argument. same vibe, two doors. 🚪
• -m [winforms,x11,console,cocoa] or -mode:[winforms,x11,console,cocoa] — a value saying what kind of app this is:
  • winforms = a Winforms application running on Quartz
  • x11 = an application that needs the X11 server running to work
  • console = a non-graphical application (no window, just vibes in the terminal)
  • cocoa = an application based on Cocoa#
• -n NAME or -appname:NAME — sets the application name of the bundle it emits. this is literally what you'll see in Finder, so make it cute. 🌈
• -o DIRECTORY or -output:DIRECTORY — the path where the generated Application gets output. point it somewhere good. 📁
• -r RESOURCE or -resource:RESOURCE — you can pass this one as many times as you want, bestie. it drops a copy of each resource into the bundle's resources directory. alternatively you can just do a comma separated list of resources and call it a day. 🍓

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Geoff Norton

⭐ WEB SITE ⭐

Visit: http://www.mono-project.com for details

and that's the whole page, periodt. this was the Mono(macpack) manual, and that lil' footer tag down at the bottom is just the same Mono(macpack) name showing up again like a signature — no version, no date, just the manual repping itself. 🧚 go build something iconic, bestie. 💜