Documentation/Nightly/Developers/Tutorials/Debugging macOS packaging

Overview

The packaging on Linux and Windows consists of:

1. copying files from the build tree to a staging folder
2. creating an archive based on the staging folder

macOS packaging includes an additional "fixup" step:

1. copying files from the build tree to a staging folder
2. fixup step
3. creating an archive based on the staging folder

macOS file copy step

• Only plugins from external projects are copied into the staging folder

macOS "fixup" step

• Copy external project dependencies into the staging folder

• fixing up a library means replacing the rpath referencing a library using an absolute path (e.g /path/to/Slicer-SuperBuilb/VTK-build/lib/libvtkXXX-X.Y.Z.dylib) with an @rpath/ based reference (e.g @rpath/path/to/libvtkXXX-X.Y.Z.dylib)