October 2006 - Installer-dev

Re: Installer chewing up CPU time on 10.3 while running postinstall
by Peter Mulholland 13 Oct '06

13 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 (Macintosh/20060516) Peter Bierman wrote: Pete. _______________________________________________ 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.… Just an idea, why not have the packages install the resources compressed into the bundle, and have the app do the decompression itself? That would be too much hassle to implement at this point - we are nearly gold and this issue only affects 10.3 We have had many issues with Apple Installer which have led us to start an inhouse installer tool. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Installer chewing up CPU time on 10.3 while running postinstall
by Peter Mulholland 13 Oct '06

13 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 (Macintosh/20060516) Hi, Pete. _______________________________________________ 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 releasing a game using Apple Installer, one package for each language the game supports. Due to the need to fit it all onto one CD, we have used 7zip to compress the data. The package installs the game's app bundle, and then a "postinstall" script runs which extracts the game data into the bundle's Resources folder. On 10.4 this is fine, and runs fairly fast (10 minutes on an old 400Mhz G4). On the same machine, under 10.3, it is excruciatingly slow. Looking at whats going on using Activity Monitor shows the Installer process using all of the CPU power, and 7za (the dearchiver) using none. On 10.4, the dearchiver is quite rightly using the most CPU power. Whats going on here? We can't ship the game like that for 10.3 users, and I can't just use the .pax format as it doesn't compress well enough... not to mention all of this is fine on 10.4! This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Installer chewing up CPU time on 10.3 while running postinstall
by Peter Bierman 13 Oct '06

13 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com -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 10:32 PM +0000 10/13/06, Peter Mulholland wrote: I'm releasing a game using Apple Installer, one package for each language the game supports. Due to the need to fit it all onto one CD, we have used 7zip to compress the data. The package installs the game's app bundle, and then a "postinstall" script runs which extracts the game data into the bundle's Resources folder. Just an idea, why not have the packages install the resources compressed into the bundle, and have the app do the decompression itself? This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Plistbudy error: Integer Unrecognized format!!
by rohit dhamija 13 Oct '06

13 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:from:to:subject:mime-version:content-type; b=pAt+fhWQNIUVtb8ZKlRr5wDPsTTATYvm2oLAdP4ODtBqtV+Z4RxmiHyYorL/X7fGekQc6U+WXGe9uBxpJXipHN0sbnCsCZyF7ifPPDboqEivRnUbVjKhr+oMy36WDNkRP3ewbCqQ4Z9noSWvBPJhg76oyouQbv2t3vVcJgiSPIk= _______________________________________________ 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: Locating previous versions
by Peter Bierman 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com --- Mark Krenek <mark(a)aspyr.com> wrote: -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 1:10 PM -0700 10/12/06, Jim Dodd wrote: I've gone round and round on this same issue and there is no easy > solution. Search installer-dev for my name and you'll see all my posts. Apple is so good about so many things. It is a shock when something likes this happens. I will not waste my time trying to figure out how the Locator works in the Installer because it doesn't. You're right. Locater in 10.4 and earlier is very hard to use. If any of you have access to Leopard seed builds, we'd love to hear feedback on improvements we've made in this area for 10.5. Obviously many developers will not be able to use 10.5 only features for a while, but someday 10.5 will be the old release and we hope it won't be as painful to utilize as looking back to 10.2 can be today. :-) This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Locating previous versions
by Jim Dodd 12 Oct '06

12 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:In-Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; b=AldGFCU2k+BfnOSOyBi/MdTw3NGgZ8oEatIKegxz1H8Sp1DY/D/QYfBfNyW0NW09rVt/Bks7WODoTckT7nlHIqX+FRJmBWmkHMH1/HUMaMRZ8lcHiOXJ3BMj89x8JUj0zcbnL1fCsCDoutn3mxNvaL7PLbzlLAfQvAStnmV8H6A= ; --- Mark Krenek <mark(a)aspyr.com> wrote: > I've gone round and round on this same issue and there is no easy > solution. Search installer-dev for my name and you'll see all my posts. > > I have not tried the newer "Distribution Packages" because they > require 10.4 or later. But I doubt they solve this problem. > > Here are the main problems with using search methods (such as > CommonAppSearch) in a package : > > - If the search does not find anything, then the install CONTINUES, > installing everything in the default location that you have to > specify in the package. Probably not what you want. > > - Even if the search method finds your existing software, it does not > pass that info to scripts. Apple has confirmed this behavior. The > installer does not provide the path of the found application to the > script. > > After talking with Apple engineers, here is what we do. This is not > pretty, but it gets the job done. > > - We wrote a wrapper app that goes around the package. The wrapper > app locates the existing application, usually using LaunchServices. > It writes the path of the found app out to a file in /tmp/ > somehardcodedfoldername. This makes up for the fact that the > Installer doesn't pass the found location to scripts. > > - If the wrapper app does not locate our app, it exits. If it finds > our app, it launches the actual installer package which is bundled > inside the wrapper app. This takes care of the case where the > Installer insists on installing stuff even when your software was not > located. > > - The installer package is designed to dump all it's files into /tmp/ > somehardcodedfoldername. > > - We then have a postupgarde/postinstall script that reads the path > of the found app from the file that the wrapper app left around in > tmp. The script then moves/copies the stuff in /tmp/ > somehardcodedfoldername to the proper location. > > Like I said, not pretty. And there's lots of gnarly details to tend > to. You could possibly do all this in InstallationChecks or > Preflights, but those have lots of gotchas. Hope this helps. > > Mark Krenek > Aspry Media > > Thank you, Mark. That does help. A great deal! Apple is so good about so many things. It is a shock when something likes this happens. I will not waste my time trying to figure out how the Locator works in the Installer because it doesn't. Our installer forces the customer to find where they moved our application (if they did - we start them in the Applications folder where we install it by default) and no one has really complained. I just thought this would be an nice enhancement. It's not worth the trouble. Regards, Jim Dodd Onset Computer Corp. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.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: Dock manipulation Re: how to get a return value from a shell script?
by Stéphane Sudre 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com On jeudi, octobre 12, 2006, at 02:16 AM, Bill Coderre 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.… On Oct 11, 2006, at 3:46 PM, Ben Zhu wrote: I like my installer to create a link of my installed app onto the dock. Can I run a script for this or is there any way to do this? There's nothing built in to the Apple Installer to do this, and no published, documented way to do it, either. Some Apple installers add items to the Dock, but the method they use is not guaranteed to work correctly, and is rather tricky. It also has undesirable side effects (it quits Dock.app, which causes loss of Dashboard state). >From what I see in some code doing this, the tricky part can be removed by writing a tool to change the Dock settings with the CFPreferences API. Yet it does not remove the quit or kill Dock.app part (but who cares about Dashboard?). This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Dock manipulation Re: how to get a return value from a shell script?
by Bill Coderre 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.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.… On Oct 11, 2006, at 3:46 PM, Ben Zhu wrote: I like my installer to create a link of my installed app onto the dock. Can I run a script for this or is there any way to do this? There's nothing built in to the Apple Installer to do this, and no published, documented way to do it, either. Some Apple installers add items to the Dock, but the method they use is not guaranteed to work correctly, and is rather tricky. It also has undesirable side effects (it quits Dock.app, which causes loss of Dashboard state). This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: Locating previous versions
by Mark Krenek 12 Oct '06

12 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Mark Krenek Aspry Media On Oct 9, 2006, at 3:11 PM, Jim Dodd wrote: I know I could just try it but I did that back in OS X 10.2 and got so frustrated that I'd like to get a hint before I dive in again. Thank you, Jim Dodd Onset Computer Corp. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.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/mark%40aspyr.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.… I've gone round and round on this same issue and there is no easy solution. Search installer-dev for my name and you'll see all my posts. I have not tried the newer "Distribution Packages" because they require 10.4 or later. But I doubt they solve this problem. Here are the main problems with using search methods (such as CommonAppSearch) in a package : - If the search does not find anything, then the install CONTINUES, installing everything in the default location that you have to specify in the package. Probably not what you want. - Even if the search method finds your existing software, it does not pass that info to scripts. Apple has confirmed this behavior. The installer does not provide the path of the found application to the script. After talking with Apple engineers, here is what we do. This is not pretty, but it gets the job done. - We wrote a wrapper app that goes around the package. The wrapper app locates the existing application, usually using LaunchServices. It writes the path of the found app out to a file in /tmp/ somehardcodedfoldername. This makes up for the fact that the Installer doesn't pass the found location to scripts. - If the wrapper app does not locate our app, it exits. If it finds our app, it launches the actual installer package which is bundled inside the wrapper app. This takes care of the case where the Installer insists on installing stuff even when your software was not located. - The installer package is designed to dump all it's files into /tmp/ somehardcodedfoldername. - We then have a postupgarde/postinstall script that reads the path of the found app from the file that the wrapper app left around in tmp. The script then moves/copies the stuff in /tmp/ somehardcodedfoldername to the proper location. Like I said, not pretty. And there's lots of gnarly details to tend to. You could possibly do all this in InstallationChecks or Preflights, but those have lots of gotchas. Hope this helps. I'm using PackageMaker. I haven't tried to use the Locator interface to find previously installed versions of our app since OS X 10.2 when it was very difficult to do. You had to enter detailed information in a TokenDefinitions.plist file. I could never get it to work and was never sure if I'd made a mistake in setting up the plist or just didn't understand how it was supposed to work. Now, with the newer, easier-to-use version of PackageMaker, I'd like to try again but one thing still eludes me. How does the Locater signal where the application was found? Specifically, I need to know the location in my preupgrade and postupgrade scripts. Is it simply that the location argument to the script (the $2 argument) is magically updated with the location? What is passed if the application cannot be found? This email sent to mark(a)aspyr.com This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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RE: how to get a return value from a shell script?
by Ben Zhu 11 Oct '06

11 Oct '06

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Thread-index: AcbsyOmuMwFrp/UESx2HArf/o9H2VgAvirBc Thread-topic: how to get a return value from a shell script? I like my installer to create a link of my installed app onto the dock. Can I run a script for this or is there any way to do this? _______________________________________________ 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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