Installer: any plans to add package management or uninstall features?
Installer: any plans to add package management or uninstall features?
- Subject: Installer: any plans to add package management or uninstall features?
- From: Jeff Harrell <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 08:04:45 -0500
I'm cross-posting this to cocoa-dev because a question about Package
Maker came up this morning, but please send follow-ups to macosx-talk.
I don't really think this is a cocoa-dev kind of question. (Of course,
if you disagree, send your follow-ups to wherever the heck you like.
It's a free planet. More or less.)
Maybe I'm way off base here, but it seems to me that Apple's Installer
has a lot going for it, but that there are a few glaring omissions.
Does anyone have any thoughts on the notion of turning Installer into a
software manager? There are a couple of third-party solutions that do
this sort of thing; DesInstaller reads receipt packages and allows the
user to uninstall software, and Pacifist (I think) reads packages and
allows the user to extract files or do partial installations. But I'd
like to see a real Apple solution to this problem.
Specifically, I'd like to see a feature in Installer to allow the user
to see what packages are installed and to remove them, given sufficient
privilege. It'd also be really neat if the user could select any given
file or folder on the system and find out what, if any, package that
file or folder belongs to. The other day I found that Helvetica Neue
was installed on my computer in an incomplete OpenType version, and
that was causing some confusion when I installed the Adobe PostScript
version. I finally found /Library/Fonts/HelveticaNeue.dfont, but I
didn't know why it was there. After much searching, and learning all
about the lsbom command (which is really neat), I found that it's part
of Essentials.pkg. Now, I couldn't *do* anything with that information,
but it would have been nice if there had been an easier way for me to
get it.
Also, what kind of support does Installer have for dependencies? Any?
I know there are going to be at least a few of you out there who think
I ought to just send Apple a suggestion and call it a day. You're
right, but I'm not sure what my own opinion on this is yet, and I'm
hoping to get a little constructive discussion going to help me sort
out my thoughts.
I also know that the whole question might be moot, because Panther
Panther Panther, oy oy oy, and so on.
But hey, what the heck. If we just sat around and waited for Apple to
read our minds... well, that's just not a very Mac-user-like thing to
do.
--
email@hidden
http://homepage.mac.com/jharrell
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