MB-System as a GMT plugin (Linux, macOS)

MB-System's programs are GMT modules (mbinfo, mbgrid, mblist, mbswath, …) living in one GMT supplement, mbsystem. The MB-System tools of this viewer (MBedit, MBeditviz, MBgrdviz, MBnavedit, MBvelocitytool, the water column viewer, CUBE) read swath files through the MBIO library that supplement brings into the process.

On Windows the supplement comes with GMT. On Linux and macOS, Geophysics ▸ MB-System ▸ Install as plugin installs it:

1. downloads the archive for the system — mbsystem-linux-x86_64.tar.gz, mbsystem-macos-arm64.tar.gz or mbsystem-macos-x86_64.tar.gz — from the mbsystem-latest release of joa-quim/MB-System;
2. unpacks it to <InteractiveGMT>/mbsystem (lib/ holds mbsystem.so / mbsystem.dylib and the MB libraries, share/mbsystem/ the Levitus database), replacing any earlier copy;
3. loads it into GMT and reports whether GMT now has the MB-System modules and where MBIO is.

From then on every start of InteractiveGMT loads it again. Running the menu item again updates it.

The same from Julia:

using InteractiveGMT
InteractiveGMT.install_mbsystem_plugin()

The archive

It is built by the plugin job of the MB-System repository's CI against GMT_jll, i.e. against the very libgmt, GDAL, PROJ, netCDF and FFTW that GMT.jl loads: on Ubuntu 22.04 (glibc 2.35, the same floor as InteractiveGMT's own Linux library), macOS 14 (Apple silicon) and macOS 15 (Intel), with $ORIGIN / @loader_path so it works from any folder. The job checks that nothing else is linked, loads the unpacked plugin through GMT.jl and runs a module before it publishes the archive. It contains only MB-System's own libraries; everything else is already in the process.

How it is loaded

GMT builds its list of plugins once, when a session is created, from GMT_CUSTOM_LIBS as read from a gmt.conf. Setting the parameter in a running session does not load anything. So InteractiveGMT has GMT write the current session's settings, plus GMT_CUSTOM_LIBS pointing at <InteractiveGMT>/mbsystem/lib/mbsystem.so (.dylib on macOS), into a temporary directory, re-creates GMT.jl's session there (GMT.gmt_restart) and deletes the directory. No gmt.conf is left anywhere, and the user's ~/.gmt/gmt.conf is never touched. Plugins already listed in GMT_CUSTOM_LIBS are kept.