Re: generating bundles without an extension?
Re: generating bundles without an extension?
- Subject: Re: generating bundles without an extension?
- From: Rua Haszard Morris <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:31:46 +1300
I found the documentation!
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFoundation/Conceptual/
CFBundles/Concepts/DocumentBundles.html
"Document packages should always have an extension to identify them—
even though that extension may be hidden by the user. The extension
allows the Finder to identify your document directory and treat it as
a package. You should never associate a document package with a MIME
type or 4-byte OS type."
(don't worry, I was looking for something else!!)
On Feb 15, 2007, at 10:37 AM, Laurence Harris wrote:
On Feb 14, 2007, at 2:47 PM, Rua Haszard Morris wrote:
Cheers both for your comments, lending weight to my understanding
of the situation. We're going to have an extension of some sort...
basically because of the "swimming upstream" issue (as opposed to
any clear info in the documentation).
Yeah, it's not the kind of thing that's worth spending time to
avoid IMO. Not even half as much as you've already spent. ;-)
only nitpicking remains...
but there seem to be some problems related to this:
1. The finder starts showing the bundle as a folder if no
extension is used (doesn't seem to matter if the extension is
something random).
Packages/bundles are folders with names whose extensions are
registered with Launch Services as belonging to a package. Look
at the plist of an application that supports some kind of
package document such as TextEdit (.rtfd documents are packages).
LSTypeIsPackage is documented as describing whether the app is
packaged, http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/
Conceptual/LaunchServicesConcepts/.
I've just tried setting it to true for the appropriate OSType in
the launch services bit of our plist, to no avail.
You'll need to use an extension you define for that to work.
Will I? Why? Where's this documented?
You need to let this go. Lots of stuff isn't documented or isn't
fully documented. That doesn't make it less true. Welcome to Mac OS
X. :-)
The launch services documentation doesn't say anything about
LSTypeIsPackage applying only to document types with an extension.
And you can define a document type based on OSType only.
The structure of a package is entirely up to the entity that
defines it. There is no requirement for any particular structure,
which is obvious if you start poking around in some. Most of them
have no Contents > PkgInfo file in them. Besides, you tried it and
it didn't work, right? Time to move on and define yourself an
extension. None of your users is going to give it a second thought.
In fact, they may well see it as evidence that you've done work to
make your product Mac OS X savvy.
It's not stated that OSTypes are only supported for legacy
reasons, or that they only apply for non-packaged (file) files.
Do yourself a favor and stop struggling with these issues. The
guidelines say you should assign file types to your documents and
yet virtually no Cocoa application does it -- not even Apple's. I
filed a bug related to file types once and devbugs sent me an e-
mail asking *me* where the issue was documented. Apple's a big
company. Lots of engineers and two separate engineering camps
(Carbon and Cocoa) for application development. I get the
impression that a lot of people there these days that have no
experience developing for what we old-Mac timers think of as the Mac.
I didn't write the docs. I'm just telling you my understanding. You
can kick against the pricks if you want, but I don't see any point
in even worrying about this.
And this has nothing to do with the finder anyway right? Or,
doesn't the finder implement part of launch services?
For example, is there somewhere that documents the fact that a
bundle _must_ have an extension in order to be displayed
correctly in the finder?
Mac OS X is extension-oriented. Not using an extension would be
nonstandard and could confuse some users. FWIW, you can set the
bit to hide the extension.
Yet Launch Services still supports OSTypes. I have nothing
against extensions, and have not seen any documentation
encouraging me not to use OSType in isolation for this purpose.
Understood, but that isn't the same as saying that you won't
encounter any issues if you don't use an extension. You may and
you may not, but I doubt Apple is investing a lot of resources to
ensure that bundles without extensions work without issues.
Yep, exactly, you're right.. like the finder may not do the right
thing..
Depends on the definition of "the right thing."
Interestingly the CFBundle apis and our plugin loading/
management code works correctly even when the finder doesn't
show the plugin as a bundle.
That's a different system.
It is related though?! The "what is a bundle" rules are
consistent, right?
Yes, but you're talking about two distinct technologies: Launch
Services and CFBundle, and they can use different rules even
though within each technology the rules are consistent.
I guess 3 technologies including the finder.
I think the Finder relies on Launch Services. The Finder doesn't
implement any of its own technology regarding all this as far as I
know.
Larry
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