Re: UI (Installer Plugins) and headless installations
Re: UI (Installer Plugins) and headless installations
- Subject: Re: UI (Installer Plugins) and headless installations
- From: Mike Fischer <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 18:41:39 +0200
Hi Stéphane,
Am 13.05.2007 um 17:14 schrieb Stéphane Sudre:
On dimanche, mai 13, 2007, at 02:23 AM, Mike Fischer wrote:
[...]
As long as a GUI is available Installer Plugins are a great
solution to this problem. But how can this be solved for the above
mentioned CLI installer or the other cases Peter referred to?
Other than completely abandoning the Apple Installer technology
and going back to the interactive CLI installation process the
client originally used I see no solution. Offering both would be
possible but would also require supporting two installers for Mac
OS X and it would involve distributing about twice as much data
since the packaging methods are completely different + appropriate
documentation.
Comments anyone?
AFAIK, there are not only 2 cases but 3 with this scenario:
(1) Manual Installation
(2) Terminal/Shell Installation
(3) ARD Installation
Yes you are correct. I had not taken ARD into account. Thanks for the
reminder.
Unfortunatly I have never had the opportunity to actually see ARD.
(The same probably goes for most people unless they are supporting a
large number of Macs.) I'm pretty sure it's cool technology but since
only paying customers have access many developers will only look at
it when they have the very specific need to do so. Documentation
seems mostly non-existant, apart from the rather short mention in the
Software Delivery Guide chapter "Performing Remote Installs". This
chapter does not mention any limitations w.r.t. Installer Plugins
though reading between the lines it's obvious that an Installer
Plugin can't be used in this scenario.
Actually doing a search on developer.apple.com for "Installer Plugin"
yields exactly 2 results, both pointing to the InstallerPluginSample
sample code. It seems Installer Plugins are completely undocumented
apart from this sample code and the header files?
(1) can use Installer Plugins
(2) (and (3) AFAIK) can not
The issue is that assuming a solution can be found for (2) when
using Apple packages, it would not be ideal for (3) since showing a
CLI in ARD can be very confusing to the user.
Yes, unless ARD had a supported way of passing individual
configuration parameters to a list of client machines I don't see how
this could work at all.
Re-Packaging everything in Apple packages would be possible in
theory, though the cost of doing so may make this impractical. (This
would not be a one-time effort but would need to repeated whenever
the software is updated.)
If (and I would be surprized at this capability) ARD allowed for
interactive command line execution of scripts on more than one
client, it would definatly be a UI nightmare. The only way I could
see something like this work would be to provide a) a generic,
possibly extendable, GUI for specifying individual parameters for the
clients and b) an extension to the current Installer Plugin mechanism
that separates the GUI (view) part from the data (model and
controller) part. For plugins factored in this way it might be
possible to build an alternative "mass-entry" GUI mechanism for the
data and have the back-end run on the individual clients to process
the data. Or in some cases it might even be possible to use a generic
GUI for the front-end.
I posted my question for two reasons:
- To find out if I had missed something important;
- To start a discussion that might lead to ideas for improving the
Apple Installer or to at least raise awareness for the limitations.
Of course once suitable ideas pop up they would need to be submitted
as bug reports, enhancement or feature request. I did not want to
start on this while I have the strong feeling of not seeing the whole
picture.
Thanks for your comments!
Mike
--
Mike Fischer Softwareentwicklung, EDV-Beratung
Schulung, Vertrieb
Web: <http://homepage.mac.com/mike_fischer/index.html>
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