I don't know why but it seems to be missing in the build I made last night. Weird. It has been automatically in kstars every time I built it for a very long time! Now it is suddenly not there.
I tried both places and tried to start KStars from the command line but got the same error:
$> /Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS/kstars
This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "cocoa"
in "".
Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Abort trap: 6
I meant: I first tried /Applications/kstars.app/Contents/Resources and tried to start KStars but got the error. Then i tried /Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS and got the same error. I even tried having the file with those contents in both directories at the same time but still I got the error.
ok, I think I understand the issue now. Somehow when I ran the build, it didn't run the macdeployqt step correctly. There are files missing from the plugins folder. The qt.conf file is missing, but the files it tells the system to look for in plugins are missing too. I will check on the build computer and see why this didn't work.
Thank you for your help. I should be able to fix this now.