Re: PackageMaker & Custom Folder Icons
Re: PackageMaker & Custom Folder Icons
- Subject: Re: PackageMaker & Custom Folder Icons
- From: Stéphane Sudre <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:21:30 +0100
On Mar 26, 2008, at 9:38 PM, Paul Cook wrote:
Does anyone know how to get Apple's PackageMaker to handle custom
folder icons?
I'm not really a developer. But in order to install software via
Apple Remote Desktop or as part of OS-X Servers NetInstall, it has
to be in an Apple style package. So we are repackaging some
software with PackageMaker. And this seems to be the most
appropriate list for PackageMaker questions.
Generally, things are working well, except that, when we run the
installers, folders have lost their custom icons. Otherwise, if
there are other problems, we haven't yet noticed them.
One example is, we were trying to repackage Office 2004 into a
package so that it could be installed by Leopard Server's
NetInstall feature. Other than being big, there doesn't appear to
be anything too complicated here. The created install works fine,
except the Office 2004 folder icon is missing. Although, if I do an
ls -Gal of the folder created with the installer, there is a .Icon
file there.
Since Office is so huge, to make testing quicker, we created a new,
folder with just a simple text file in it and using finder's Get
Info, we copied the icon from the original Office 2004 folder and
pasted it into the test folder. It seems to recreate the problem
fine. The package creates a the folder, as it should, except no
custom icon displays.
I'm using the Leopard Developer Utilities on a Mac running the
current version of Leopard.
Based on some google hits for the problem, I've played with trying
to not filter out the .DS_Store files. We've tried playing with
what is the root for the package. And we put the source for Package
Maker onto a UFS disk image to force any resources into Apple
Double format. (One hit suggested that PackageMaker didn't properly
handle resource forks. Is true?) We have also looked at what Apple
documentation we could find on how to use PackageMaker.
We didn't want to let a little think like an Icon be a blemish on
the quality of the effort, but after about 5 hours on this little
icon problem, we decided to take a break.
Any ideas?
On which OS are you observing this issue?
Custom Folder icons has a troubled history with Installer.app and Mac
OS X.
o First, a refresher on custom folder icons:
To have a custom folder icon you need to have both an invisible Icon
\r file inside the folder and some flags set on the folder itself.
* Icon\r file
It is a Resource fork file. The different icon representations are
stored in 'icns' resource -16455. The file type is 'icon', the
creator is 'MACS'. The FileInfo finderFlags for this file has the
kIsInvisible flag set
* Folder:
The FolderInfo finderFlags for the folder has the kHasCustomIcon flag
set.
o This means that in order to have a custom folder icon, a package
needs to both retain the resource fork of the Icon\r file and the
Finder flags.
This is done through the split forks operation that creates the Apple
Double format file. A file A may end up through this process as 2 files:
A which only contains the data fork part of A
._A which contains the finder Info and the resource fork of A
I filed a bug report (Problem ID: 3635123 04/27/2004 which is said to
be a duplicate of 3551477). At the time, the issue was that the
kHasCustomIcon was not set back on the folder upon installation.
I can't say whether the bug was fixed or not on the OS I was
observing it because the report was marked as duplicate.
My $0.02
--
Stephane
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