Re: how a single product will install to different locations
Re: how a single product will install to different locations
- Subject: Re: how a single product will install to different locations
- From: Stéphane Sudre <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 09:44:54 +0200
On Jul 1, 2008, at 11:50 PM, Bill Coderre wrote:
On Jul 1, 2008, at 2:18 PM, Paul Miller wrote:
I'm a plugin developer too, and unfortunately, the sad reality is
that plugin installation for Adobe Photoshop (and other hosts) is
our #1 customer support issue. Customers generally have several
versions of Photoshop or After Effects or whatever installed, and
the plugin locations of these products is usually something like
/Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Plug-ins/
A "simple" Mac installer just doesn't know enough to help the user
install their plugin into that path, since we can't easily find
out which Adobe products (or versions) they may have installed.
I agree that these needs are not well served by Installer.app.
The solution I gave, I think it's a commonly-used approach. I added
a few security tweaks. It can work just fine in 10.3, probably 10.1.
Unfortunately, without a completely insane amount of work or
writing custom installer plugins or even a custom installer (as
Adobe did), we're literally *forced* to ask the user something
they may not necessarily know, or forget to change with the
"Choose Location" button.
This is probably why I see this question asked almost once a week.
I asked it myself a few months back.
On Windows, this is a relatively trivial thing with most installer
tools. Or, we can easily search out the latest version of
Photoshop (that we know about) and default the install location to
that. I still can't even do something as simple as that with
installer scripts (at least in pre-Leopard, but you know, we still
have to support Tiger users too!).
It's clear that Installer.app's "find" functionality is
insufficient for this. Installer.app is also not capable of
installing one "thing" in several places.
Maybe a solution is to rely on Installer.app for what it can do and
use another solution to do what it can't.
In the case described, if we omit installations from Terminal or ARD,
a solution could be to write a helper app that would:
- look for the locations of possibly multiple Photoshop installation
- present the list to the user (checkboxes to select where to install
it)
- request admin authentication
- for each selected destination:
1. Modify the default location to the appropriate one within the
package (good luck with a FLAT package)
2. install the package through the installer command line tool.
(Yeah, progression would not be displayed but it does prevent you to
display an indeterminate progress bar in the helper app).
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