Hello,
Our company distributes an application that is tri-platform, Windows,
Mac OS X and Linux. The components are mostly in Java and we use ant
to automate the packaging process since it will run on any of the
platforms. Currently we build zip bundles with the appropriate files
for the given platform, and usually do the build under Linux.
Mac users have been reporting problems running the apps after
downloading, however. This seems to happen routinely under OS X
10.3+, and on some 10.2 systems (but not the ones we use for
developing). An investigation of the problem revealed that under 10.2
on most systems, when the zip was extracted all files were set +x so
that the applications were runnable. Under 10.3, all systems we have
tested set the permissions -x on everything so that the applications
aren't runnable. Scanning past posts to this lists confirms that the
behavior was changed between 10.2 and 10.3, presumably for security
reasons.
We are trying to figure out the best solution to this, since telling
people to open a terminal and change the permissions on a file to get
their shiny new software app to run is a good way to lose customers.
As far as I understand, zip won't store permissions? Is there some
other cross-platform archive format that we can use that will make
sure the permissions still get set right on a Mac? DMG seems like the
best format, but as far as I've been able to determine we can't
construct these under Linux which is where we build the packages.
Somebody suggested tar, but it seems ugly to hand the average Mac
users a tar file. Another suggestion posted in the past on the list
was to use a jar file with the main routine set up to extract the
files from the jar and set the permissions. This last one is the most
feasible suggestion I've seen so far, but still not as easy as having
people download and have everything extracted ready to go.
Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated,
-Brad
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