October 2006 - Installer-dev

Re: PackageMaker fails when run from the command line
by Walter 18 Oct '06

18 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Thread-index: AcbyUR9qXh81yF5EEdue3gAWy8yhdA== Thread-topic: PackageMaker fails when run from the command line User-agent: Microsoft-Entourage/11.2.5.060620 I am using Xcode 2.3 Did you mean to say its fixed in 2.4? Does the PackageMaker version match Xcode? Walter On 10/16/06 1:35 PM, "Frederik Seiffert" <fseiffert(a)apple.com> wrote: > On Oct 14, 2006, at 4:46 AM, Walter wrote: > >> The following command fails: >> /Developer/Applications/Utilities/PackageMaker.app/Contents/MacOS/ >> PackageMak >> er -build -proj myProject.pmproj -p myProject.pkg -v >> >> The error is: "No root specified for archive". >> >> If I change "root" on the contents pane to an Absolute folder, then it >> works. > > This bug should be fixed with XCode 2.3. Please try with the latest > XCode from http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/. > > Fred _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Building a Distribution from the command line
by Roger Ackerman 17 Oct '06

17 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; h=Message-ID:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; b=b98eMBLYgZV21CkoCloQrfqmQ1QrEPmBBninl6MMTUZw0OKCS9EjTwLJ4svYw2G1tj66VYtRqd7omlk0lksfClBSw7NCsVGe3NLb73fhOza5QAVVgwRarDIwjjrnEytCiVeL3B9d0y7FFS/IenJUq8TCJ+5viTshh71ssXH7zZs= ; _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Getting a user's preferences folder while requiring admin authorization
by cohen.rick＠gmail.com 17 Oct '06

17 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:reply-to:user-agent:mime-version:to:subject:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:from; b=dgIw4SZoR+eimn8HD6AHRqrfV23GAWt15fadLEGV/XdU7QsXMJragoskoG0PmKp1dtJn/ZpcmyCgPesw1MAhlsJV597KzYac8GqhQ+LNaMbvUL3SJ3xtwQyz1euO8tXUDq4mpJ1ig64oIZDqFbV5kF/MKkDMufwSLM4mkzpM+Hc= User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 (Windows/20060909) Hi folks, - Rick _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… I'm not quite sure if this question belongs here or in the carbon-dev list, so I'll try this list first. Thanks for your patience! In my installer, I need to find a user's preferences folder. I had written a C++ program to do this (using FindFolder with kUserDomain and kPreferencesFolderType) and called that from a shell script. I also need to place files into locations that require admin authorization ("/Library/Audio/Plug-ins/Components"). When I run my installer from an admin account, the FindFolder program works correctly. When I run my installer from a non-admin account, the installer (correctly) asks for the admin username and password. That's fine, except now my "FindFolder" program thinks that I am the root user, and finds a path like "/private/var/root/Library/Preferences/". Any insights or suggestions into solving this dilemma would be greatly appreciated! This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re[5]: Installer chewing up CPU time on 10.3 while running postinstall
by Peter Bierman 17 Oct '06

17 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com The breakdown is supposed to be something like this (according to WWDC 2005 Keynote (all the information is public)): - 50% of the OS X installed base using 10.4 - 30-40% for 10.3 So, eliminating 30-40% of our customers simply because Installer is not up to the task of installing the product, is not really an option - especially when the games themselves run just fine on 10.3. So I did some quick google searches, and found http://www4.macnn.com/macnn/wwdc/05/ which says we said (in 2005): Jaguar (10.2) 25% Panther (10.3) 49% Tiger (10.4) 16% That was 6 weeks after Tiger shipped, 19 months (and like 6 million Macs) ago! -pmb _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… At 1:03 AM +0100 10/17/06, Peter Mulholland wrote: As Stéphane pointed out, Omnigroup's statistics are only completely accurate for their own customers, but I can tell you that the curves they show look pretty similar to the ones I see for my customers. You have to decide for yourself though who _your_ customers are, because those are the ones that should matter when making this decision. You may discover exactly what you assume: That creating your own installer is worth the investment to access those additional customers. I'm only suggesting that you don't want to make too many assumptions. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re[5]: Installer chewing up CPU time on 10.3 while running postinstall
by Peter Mulholland 17 Oct '06

17 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Hello Stéphane, Monday, October 16, 2006, 8:51:29 PM, you wrote: > The breakdown is supposed to be something like this (according to WWDC > 2005 Keynote (all the information is public)): > - 50% of the OS X installed base using 10.4 > - 30-40% for 10.3 So, eliminating 30-40% of our customers simply because Installer is not up to the task of installing the product, is not really an option - especially when the games themselves run just fine on 10.3. -- Best regards, Peter mailto:darkmatter@freeuk.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Requirements and Mac OS X evolution
by Peter Bierman 16 Oct '06

16 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com On lundi, octobre 16, 2006, at 01:10 AM, Peter Bierman wrote: Otherwise... distribution scripts. -pmb _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… At 9:37 PM +0200 10/16/06, Stéphane Sudre wrote: So use whatever is documented as best at the time you write the code, and you shouldn't have to change your code until there isn't any way to make that work. Ok, so basically, the only solution is still the InstallationCheck script, a solution which is still the best one and supported for 20 years. If you're developing your package on 10.3, when InstallationCheck was documented as the best choice for what it does, then yes. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Re[3]: Installer chewing up CPU time on 10.3 while running postinstall
by Stéphane Sudre 16 Oct '06

16 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com On lundi, octobre 16, 2006, at 01:02 AM, Peter Bierman wrote: _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… At 11:22 PM +0100 10/14/06, Peter Mulholland wrote: Why on earth, have Apple not pushed out Installer updates to 10.3 users? Distribution scripts and such would make our lives a hell of a lot easier! We have found that our customers are best served by focusing our energy on continuous improvement instead of establishing a functional baseline. For example, it's probable that we'd never have created distribution scripts if we had instead been porting 10.3 functionality back to > 10.2. This is obviously frustrating to some developers and users. It's frustrating to me too that we can't please everyone, because I really like our users and developers. :-) But someday 10.4 will be the acceptable baseline. And someday 10.5, etc... So with every release we raise the bar so when that someday comes, developers will have the installer features they need for their products. I don't have the authority to release an exact breakdown of what percentages of our customers are running 10.4 vs 10.3, etc, but it's much more dramatic than most people would estimate. You might want to evaluate whether supporting your product on 10.3 is actually > necessary. For example, the Omni Group publishes these statistics gathered from their users: http://update.omnigroup.com/ The breakdown is supposed to be something like this (according to WWDC 2005 Keynote (all the information is public)): - 50% of the OS X installed base using 10.4 - 30-40% for 10.3 - the rest is 10.2, 10.1 and 10.0 (even though I would be surprised anyone ever really used the 10.0 release). The Omni Group figures are flawed IMHO and can't be used for anyone other than the Omni Group. A lot of Omni Group products are or have been bundled with Mac systems (Omni Graffle (great product) & Omni Outliner). Surprisingly enough, Apple is shipping the latest version of its OS with every Mac system. So if you consider that Apple shipped quite a lot of Mac systems since 10.4 was out, that almost all systems had a Omni Product with it, guess which version would show up in the statistics. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Requirements and Mac OS X evolution
by Stéphane Sudre 16 Oct '06

16 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com On lundi, octobre 16, 2006, at 01:10 AM, Peter Bierman wrote: On Mac OS X 10.2, the physical memory is known via hw.physmem. On Mac OS X 10.4, the physical memory is known via hw.memsize. At 12:32 PM +0200 10/14/06, Stéphane Sudre wrote: It seems that there are some evolutions in Mac OS X that can impact requirements, sysctl ones for instance. Considering that if one name changed once, all can change in the future, what is the official recommended way to deal with this kind of "oops, we changed it again" issue? Typically, the previous mechanism is supported up until the point that it breaks. In your example, hw.physmem works until the machine has 2GB of RAM. This was an acceptable limitation for the first 20 years of sysctl. > :-) So use whatever is documented as best at the time you write the code, and you shouldn't have to change your code until there isn't any way to make that work. (See how long QuickDraw has been supported, for example.) Ok, so basically, the only solution is still the InstallationCheck script, a solution which is still the best one and supported for 20 years. _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: PackageMaker fails when run from the command line
by Frederik Seiffert 16 Oct '06

16 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com On Oct 14, 2006, at 4:46 AM, Walter wrote: The error is: "No root specified for archive". If I change "root" on the contents pane to an Absolute folder, then it works. Fred _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… The following command fails: /Developer/Applications/Utilities/PackageMaker.app/Contents/MacOS/ PackageMak er -build -proj myProject.pmproj -p myProject.pkg -v This bug should be fixed with XCode 2.3. Please try with the latest XCode from http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Requirements and Mac OS X evolution
by Peter Bierman 15 Oct '06

15 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com On Mac OS X 10.2, the physical memory is known via hw.physmem. On Mac OS X 10.4, the physical memory is known via hw.memsize. (See how long QuickDraw has been supported, for example.) -pmb _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Installer-dev mailing list (Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/installer-dev/site_archiver%40lists.… At 12:32 PM +0200 10/14/06, Stéphane Sudre wrote: It seems that there are some evolutions in Mac OS X that can impact requirements, sysctl ones for instance. Considering that if one name changed once, all can change in the future, what is the official recommended way to deal with this kind of "oops, we changed it again" issue? Typically, the previous mechanism is supported up until the point that it breaks. In your example, hw.physmem works until the machine has 2GB of RAM. This was an acceptable limitation for the first 20 years of sysctl. :-) So use whatever is documented as best at the time you write the code, and you shouldn't have to change your code until there isn't any way to make that work. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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