Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
- Subject: Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
- From: Thomas Castiglione <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 21:41:19 +0800
On Friday, October 4, 2002, at 08:19 PM, Eric Dahlman wrote:
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 ;-)
I like disk images myself.. they're not all _that_ slow to mount, and
if you configure them right they open their window automatically, all
ready for you to just drag your application to where you want it and
then unmount the image again. You can have nice window backgrounds,
too... license agreements and such.. all while preserving a
byte-for-byte copy of the filesystem and allowing the user total choice
as to where they put the file. Packages are unacceptable due to the way
the trash permissions and symlinks, and archives are okay.. IF you
haven't got anything that's going to get corrupted/truncated/have its
permissions fiddled.
- Thomas Castiglione
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.