Re: Any up-to-date documentation about os x software distribution?
Re: Any up-to-date documentation about os x software distribution?
- Subject: Re: Any up-to-date documentation about os x software distribution?
- From: Doug Brown <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:32:03 +1000
>> On 20 April 2011 21:25, Ulf Dunkel<
email@hidden> wrote:
> But there are many users (often switchers!) who really wonder how to handle
> DMG. When you have to prepare an installer for a multi-component product, I
> would even recommend to use an MPKG installer, because many users clutter
> their Applications folder by simply dragging multiple components from a DMG
> into it, without seeing the need to create a folder for these multiple
> components first. Chances are that they overwrite some Readme.PDF or stuff
> when they don't manage the multiple components from DMG in their
> Applications folder.
It is common practice to provide packages and meta packages in a DMG (particularly because most packages are not flat). A DMG is not just an archive like zip; it's a filesystem and thus has a range of additional benefits over a traditional archive format like zip or tar. It would be more appropriate to compare DMG to the ISO format. You could think of downloading a DMG containing software as like downloading a CD image.
> Since some years, we do only distribute single-component .app bundles in ZIP
> files and did never ever get any complaints from our users, but we did for
> DMG files in the past.
The customer isn't always right. I am continuously having to educate people in my organisation regarding things such as this regardless of the platform.
> Maybe this discussion can be of interest for you:
>>
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/07/24/installing-applications-on-the-mac-still-broken/>
> <
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/07/25/more-on-installing-applications/>
Please take the time to learn the benefits of using the DMG format over traditional archives. A feature that comes to mind is the built-in checksumming to detect corruption. I particularly like this feature when I need to backup an entire filesystem and need confirmation that the image taken isn't corrupt.
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