Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
- Subject: Re: Bochs - Free PC emulator
- From: Charles Srstka <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 12:20:30 -0500
I'm sorry, but I must very strongly disagree.
Tar, gzip, bz2, etc. trash MacOS metadata and resource forks and thus
should not be used to distribute Mac files.
StuffIt is a proprietary format and can trash UNIX metadata such as
file permissions. In addition, it has a nasty habit of truncating long
filenames. The new version of StuffIt corrects these problems, but has
other bugs, still is proprietary, still costs money, and to boot
there's no guarantee that your users will have the latest StuffIt
Expander.
Disk images are easy to use, are guaranteed preserve *any* metadata
that the file system can support, and are supported by all versions of
Mac OS X, out of the box. In addition, disk images have some nifty
little features like the ability to mount remotely over the network
using the "hdiutil" command-line tool, allowing you to just get one
file out of an archive without having to download the whole thing, and
download without leaving a garbage file behind on the desktop.
Since the above command is sure to get integrated into web browsers at
some point in the future, I would *very strongly* recommend the use of
disk images to distribute files.
Oh, and Apple recommends it too.
Charles
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.
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.
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.
Wade Tregaskis
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