Packaging MetaCall as a portable tarball with all libs and binaries precompiled

[AkechiShiro]

I've tried to package MetaCall with Python support under an OSX-KVM VM using a bash script (build.sh).

This process has been stalled due to multiples issues encountered :

• The following command sudo installer -pkg /path/to/package.pkg -target / does not care about the argument given to -target and always installs Python as a system dependency.

• So I tried to package/make portable the system Python following this blog instruction, but ran into another issue, all files from the system Python installation are signed by Apple/Apple developers.

• Tweaking the rpath of the libraries would throw this error :
  

• A quick search on Google about this error led us to this StackOverFlow answer :
  

• We disabled code signing on a few files of Python and tried again, gave us this error :
  

• We tried to use dtruss to trace system calls but met a bug in DTrace implementation from Apple which is at the moment closed source, and thus cannot be solved directly to understand what is going on.
  

Hence, after discussion with @viferga and @giarve, we decided to work on Homebrew support so that we can figure out a solution later for this packaging approach.

Some solutions, we have yet to try :

• Request for an M1 in the Cloud to dev from MacStadium : https://www.macstadium.com/opensource-application
• Bypass Anti-VM bans from Apple by tweaking SMBIOS values thus allowing us the use to use an Apple Developer account : https://passthroughpo.st/prepping-osx-vm-for-apple-id/
• Ad-hoc signing : https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/288291/what-are-the-restrictions-of-ad-hoc-code-signing

Future steps

Next step should be to install python (or any other runtime in its relocatable form), here's some links about relocatable python and ruby distributions:

• Try and use this : https://github.com/gregneagle/relocatable-python
• Shipping Python on MacOSX : https://t-lark.github.io/posts/shipping-python/
• Python 3.8.5 framework build : https://gist.github.com/gregneagle/18f177a428a54465d72c3362a299c78a

For Ruby support, we might want to use this :

• https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-portable-ruby
• https://github.com/phusion/traveling-ruby

[viferga]

This has been partially solved towards a more general solution, I am leaving this here for reference: metacall/brew-pkg#4