[OS X]: adaptations for VLC built the MacPorts way
MacPorts has ports for VLC (2.1.5) and VLC-devel (currently 2.2.0 rc2) which install the components of interest to other ports in Linux/Posix style under its install prefix (typically /opt/local), and alter the VLC.app app bundle such that these components are found through symlinks to the directories in which they are installed:
VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/lib -> ${prefix}/lib VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins -> ${prefix}/lib/plugins
VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share and /opt/local/share/vlc have slightly different contents so I have left them as is for now.
VLC 2.1.5 had issues with this scheme for instance when calling the non app-bundle executable ${prefix}/bin/vlc, or when loading libvlc in any 3rd party application like phonon-backend-vlc . The plugins weren't found. This has been remedied to a large extent by Rémy Denis-Courmont in darwin/dirs.c ; attached are the remaining changes I have found necessary. Though perfectly transparent, I'm not expecting these changes to be incorporated. It would be useful though, and I would be very much interested in constructive feedback how to improve them (or the MacPorts install scheme).
Note that these don't make ${prefix}/bin/vlc functional beyond finding its plugins, at least not with the standard OS X interface module (DBus control appears to work, though). Also note that the executable built this way has an issue initialising OpenGL, which is not due to the attached patches.