Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
- Subject: Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
- From: Eric Dahlman <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 07:19:22 -0500
On Friday, October 4, 2002, at 12:47 AM, Wade Tregaskis wrote:
Disk images are, bar none, the best way to distribute an app on Mac
OS X. If at all possible, you should use this method.
If at all possible, you shouldn't.
Disc images are the slowest and most unwieldy way of doing things.
Any gzip/sit/installer/pkg can be double clicked and handled
appropriately and quickly. Disk images are slow - even *slower* now
under Jaguar - to mount, and require excessive window opening,
shuffling, and copying. They also still have issues being ejected.
So Disk Images = BAD :-(
What about self mounting images? I don't remember much clikkin' round
with those...
I would strongly encourage developers to seek alternatives to any sort
of disk image format. The only unique function they have is where you
need a byte-perfect copy of a disc, such as if you distribute a
bootable image or somesuch. Otherwise, there are many better ways.
On a related note, developers should be careful with packages on
pre-Jaguar, as the 100-meg bug will make packages unusable on some
systems.
So Packages = BAD :-(
Therefore the best format is some variation of a custom installer, or
a sit/zip/gzip/bz2/etc archive. Use an installer only if you need to
install items into Library folders (and/or need special privileges to
do so), or other specific and immobile places. Otherwise, any
compressed archive will do nicely.
Just to mention for these stuffit has a problem with corrupting the
data in these [1] so then you have to use the command line to safely
extract them. Which is also bad because it can create undeleatable[2]
(in OS/X 10.1 at any rate) files which corrupt the directory they are
in! = BAD :-(
Alas what options have we left to us... (Ok that was a bit much ;-) )
-Eric
[1] There are issues with converting line encodings where stuffit
messes up files by improperly recoding them. Look at Oroborosx for an
example of this.
[2] Using tar to extract a file with some Latin-1 characters in its
name will cause the creations of a mangled directory entry which is
undeletable and will break both the finder and ls when operating on
that directory. It is necessary to remove such files in OS 9 which I
no longer have so I don't want to deal with this one again ;-)
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