Installer.app: Features and document requests
Installer.app: Features and document requests
- Subject: Installer.app: Features and document requests
- From: Stéphane Sudre <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2005 18:33:07 +0200
As with all software, Installer.app has bugs. It had bugs, it has bugs,
it will have bugs.
Some of these bugs are affecting features required by packages or
metapackages.
This has an impact on packages distribution as a package may not be
installed properly due to a bug in a specific version of Installer.app
which has been fixed in a later version.
Most package creators are not aware of all the past, present and
certainly not future bugs in Installer.app.
Yet, they are the ones who will be contacted when their packages do not
install correctly or a customer installed it when he/she shall not have
been able to.
They can also be contacted by a customer/user who is not able to
install a package because he/she removes Installer.app from the
/Applications/Utilities folder.
To try to prevent these situations, could it be possible for Apple to:
- list all the past and present bugs in Installer.app (and PackageMaker
eventually) so that it is easier to figure out which feature can be
trusted and which can not be through the different versions of Mac OS
X. For instance, it has been my own experience that the relocatable
flag and the admin authorization are the best ways to ruin an
installation because of old bugs. So I never use them and do not
recommend using them.
- add the ability for a package to define the minimum version of
Installer.app required to install it. This would somehow lead to the
need of being able to download newer versions of Installer.app
separately from Mac OS X updates.
- move Installer.app from /Applications/Utilities to
/System/Library/CoreServices. Personally, in 5 years, I have never
double-clicked on the Installer.app application. So I am somehow
wondering why it is available there. But YMMV. It could be argued that
the removal of Installer.app could have been done by an admin. In this
case, the admin shall be told that it does not prevent from installing
a package even if he/she removed the command-line tool too.
My $0.02
I will file an enhancement request which is probably going to be
redirected to /dev/null but this will wait for Bug Reporter data base
to be fixed.
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