January 2007 - Installer-dev

Installer packages asking for authentication in user's home directory
by Michael Watson 08 Jan '07

08 Jan '07

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Is there a way to solve this, aside from pre/post-install workarounds? -- Michael Watson _______________________________________________ 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.… Using Package Maker 2.1.1 under Tiger, I seem to be unable to build an installer package that will allow a user to install into his or her home directory without authenticating. (That is, without pre/post- install workarounds.) It appears that Package Maker doesn't actually make use of, say, something like NSFileManager to determine whether or not a user has write access to an area, and then prompt if necessary for authentication. It's using its own internal rule set, which just doesn't seem to be very smart: 1. I have to choose a default installation directory. 2. If I choose "Administrator" or "root" for the authentication option, the user is prompted to authenticate even for places he or she has write access. Unacceptable. 3. If I choose "none" for the authentication option, the user is not prompted for authentication under any circumstance, and thus cannot choose to install to those places that would normally trigger an authentication prompt. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

1 0

Samples of command line packagemaker?
by Shane Looker 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

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:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition; b=Do8lkBaxVte1/PcQcD/YcMoTR7lRnxucOkZlXu2aaaR/5Tb5kIgUZWKVk15gghROq3ohwHbzU+h8rbCGZzoxhbH/rAcFYJkKu7j0sT6ZrOdbkkBp1Ozh/b9ENerbK07kzldOSvkhOIO1wl/QkTUAWKFvWW1F5eAOqwoqBY9b/78= Hello all. I have two possibly non-trivial questions I've been trying to work out answers to, but I'm stumped. Background: I'm trying to script a complex installer build which will fit into an automated system (so no GUI interaction.) This will eventually have 3 packages and a meta-package for installation on 10.3 and newer. Question 1: I think I will be wanting to use the command: packagemaker -build -snapshot [other stuff] to build this, but I can not find any documentation other than the man page. Does anybody have any suggestions, sample scripts, tutorials or anything to help me? Filling in the [other stuff] has stymied me. Question 2: How do I make sure all the license files, Read Me files etc in the resources folder are properly attached and used by the built package? Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions you have. Shane Looker efi.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

1 0

checking for CPU Architecture
by Goldfarb, Tammy A 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Thread-index: AccxBKnI9D8qfX4qTpOD7UK55ZRCBA== Thread-topic: checking for CPU Architecture _______________________________________________ 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

1 0

Re: Random installation failures with packages in disk images.
by Kevin Harris 04 Jan '07

04 Jan '07

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:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=VbuC19G1GtbnfqYTU7ssjJgQ5rxJY5m8Oo+uHBCgxIBW8pWbfc+MUKsKnWTgYjkqgaNXr51S1Eg/F8WBw3qw+pSJ8YhuOwn5IGgmMYcnEjZQhwi4q4VwiCfVCiz7mcs0vzx7Opn5NHfjuu9FgU+IMRpV9Y1hTZX3IQaIwZEGX00= The next time this happens, use the Terminal to see what is going on inside the /Volumes directory. I have seen situations where an installer volume did not get mounted or unmounted properly and I would wind up with something that looks like: /Volumes/Decoder /Volumes/Decoder 1 Thanks for the suggestions. I've seen that quite a few times. Unfortunately, this isn't one of those cases. The path where the package was located was complete, could be examined, and could even be copied elsewhere. The only hint that something was wrong was the breakage reported by the installer. I have seen the installer complete successfully if I ditto that "invalid package path" somewhere else and install it from there. The /Volumes/Decoder directory is invalid and has nothing in it. The / Volumes/Decoder 1 path is where the DMG actually got mounted. Once this starts happening, your file system is fairly scrambled and you'll need to reboot. This only happened when I was building and We don't normally run into problems with multiple mounts because we parse the xml (plist) spit out by hdiutil to determine the mount point. When I've seen the files in /Volumes in the strangest state (unrelated to the current problem) is normally when hdiutil info reports the mount point for some volume as a non-existent /Volumes/8NpfS78@jf or something like that (I can't find my log that shows that particular breakage). In cases that severe (which were only common on 10.3, and only on an automated build machine), I've normally had to kill a few hundred diskarbitrationd processes to regain functionality of hdiutil. testing the DMG files. So, if you are mounting/unmounting the same DMG file with the same volume name several dozen times, you may get a failure. It is unlikely that an end user would see this. Unfortunately, we are having "clean" machines that are running into this problem. I have not yet seen it happen on an Intel machine, but we have far more PPC machines. You can't see anything wrong from the Finder. You have to use the Terminal. If this is also what you are experiencing, just reboot. Rebooting does seem to solve the problem, but the indications you mention aren't present. Unfortunately, rebooting is not a viable option for most of our customers, should they encounter this. They tend to do an automated install of the software on many machines in parallel, and picking out a few sick machines for reboot would be a hassle. It would be even worse if it happened in an upgrade and a few but not all of our packages were successfully upgraded. Thanks again. -Kevin- _______________________________________________ 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 1/3/07, John Daniel <jdaniel(a)etresoft.com> wrote: This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

1 0

Re: Random installation failures with packages in disk images.
by John Daniel 04 Jan '07

04 Jan '07

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com /Volumes/Decoder /Volumes/Decoder 1 John On Jan 4, 2007, at 2:49 AM, Kevin Harris wrote: The directory structure at "/Volumes/testpackage-1.2.3/testpackage.pkg" is complete (contains a complete set of files for Contents and Resources) and installs most of the time. It is only occasionally that it fails with the above error. Any use of the installer program (for pkginfo, etc) will fail in such a situation, unless the package is copied somewhere else (eg. /tmp). After rebooting the machine and remounting the ISO / DMG files, the installation always seems to work. In certain other cases (random as to when this works), unmounting other filesystems that were already mounted with hdiutil will cause the installation to proceed. Although this seems to happen randomly, it occurs on a regular basis such that it causes problems at least once a day on my dev box. I'm using an up-to-date MacOS 10.4.8 ppc machine, and other up-to-date machines also suffer from this problem. I don't remember ever having problems like this with 10.3 or versions of 10.4 prior to 10.4.6. I'm going to try it some more on 10.4.8 intel and 10.3 boxes to see if I can cause this error to happen on purpose. Has anyone else encountered something like this? Any suggestions of things I can try to either more consistently replicate this issue or avoid it altogether? _______________________________________________ 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 next time this happens, use the Terminal to see what is going on inside the /Volumes directory. I have seen situations where an installer volume did not get mounted or unmounted properly and I would wind up with something that looks like: The /Volumes/Decoder directory is invalid and has nothing in it. The / Volumes/Decoder 1 path is where the DMG actually got mounted. Once this starts happening, your file system is fairly scrambled and you'll need to reboot. This only happened when I was building and testing the DMG files. So, if you are mounting/unmounting the same DMG file with the same volume name several dozen times, you may get a failure. It is unlikely that an end user would see this. You can't see anything wrong from the Finder. You have to use the Terminal. If this is also what you are experiencing, just reboot. Here's the situation: I have a mounted ISO image that contains a DMG file. Occasionally when mounting this DMG file, the installation of any packages contained within will barf with the command-line installer reporting things like this (the package name and mount point were both altered in this example): $ installer -verbose -target / -pkg /Volumes/testpackage-1.2.3/ testpackage.pkg installer: Error the package path specified was invalid: '/Volumes/testpackage-1.2.3/testpackage.pkg' Thanks. -Kevin- _______________________________________________ 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/jdaniel% 40etresoft.com This email sent to jdaniel(a)etresoft.com This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

1 0

Random installation failures with packages in disk images.
by Kevin Harris 04 Jan '07

04 Jan '07

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:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition; b=cIrfT7oBefz3oT2OeKfP+YmBJt7RFa+Xij6lYRt0hGmbjLehwA/E9fCWebfrLmQiK2zpVuXluXp0rjhJOODTibM6PNme4ldYgV20WxGCq+5KkFRLFlYue4ffbA7wm19l29wD+ZvyDfHh684TmO4zreogo1H/XKtPV9dcqCIr3cQ= Here's the situation: I have a mounted ISO image that contains a DMG file. Occasionally when mounting this DMG file, the installation of any packages contained within will barf with the command-line installer reporting things like this (the package name and mount point were both altered in this example): $ installer -verbose -target / -pkg /Volumes/testpackage-1.2.3/testpackage.pkg installer: Error the package path specified was invalid: '/Volumes/testpackage-1.2.3/testpackage.pkg' The directory structure at "/Volumes/testpackage-1.2.3/testpackage.pkg" is complete (contains a complete set of files for Contents and Resources) and installs most of the time. It is only occasionally that it fails with the above error. Any use of the installer program (for pkginfo, etc) will fail in such a situation, unless the package is copied somewhere else (eg. /tmp). After rebooting the machine and remounting the ISO / DMG files, the installation always seems to work. In certain other cases (random as to when this works), unmounting other filesystems that were already mounted with hdiutil will cause the installation to proceed. Although this seems to happen randomly, it occurs on a regular basis such that it causes problems at least once a day on my dev box. I'm using an up-to-date MacOS 10.4.8 ppc machine, and other up-to-date machines also suffer from this problem. I don't remember ever having problems like this with 10.3 or versions of 10.4 prior to 10.4.6. I'm going to try it some more on 10.4.8 intel and 10.3 boxes to see if I can cause this error to happen on purpose. Has anyone else encountered something like this? Any suggestions of things I can try to either more consistently replicate this issue or avoid it altogether? Thanks. -Kevin- _______________________________________________ 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

1 0

Re: Checking for system version
by Bill Coderre 04 Jan '07

04 Jan '07

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 Jan 3, 2007, at 3:34 PM, Stéphane Sudre wrote: On mercredi, janvier 3, 2007, at 11:43 PM, adam_online(a)mac.com wrote: What is the best way to check what version of the Mac OS a user is using? For example, I only want to install my software if they are using Mac OS X 10.4.3 or above. Thanks in advance. InstallationCheck or VolumeCheck scripts will work on any OS release. You can find scripts checking for this in some Apple's packages (QuickTime is the first to come to my mind). Use a VolumeCheck script if you want the user to set the installation target to a partition different from the startup one. The standard place to check is /System/Library/CoreServices/ SystemVersion.plist Almost all installers will be satisfied by checking the "ProductVersion" propert in this plist. InstallationCheck gets all the checks that are not installation- destination specific, such as, "do you have 10.4.8 or later" or "do you have hardware that requires this software." If your installer is not installing system pieces, chances are you don't need a VolumeCheck at all, since the installer itself will handle disk space considerations. (Installer.app has a bit of confusion about installing "onto a drive." Most Apple installers end up installing bits and pieces into "the system" (ie, /System, /Library, various Unix folders), so either they restrict installation to the booted system volume (our consumer stuff is that way), OR they allow you to specify a drive, but then they install the system pieces into the selected drive's system domain, not the booted system domain. Chances are, your installer doesn't install stuff into the system, so you just use the volume selection as a destination for your app, so you don't need to test for anything in a volume check.) This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

1 0

Re: Checking for system version
by Stéphane Sudre 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com On mercredi, janvier 3, 2007, at 11:43 PM, adam_online(a)mac.com wrote: My $0.02 _______________________________________________ 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.… What is the best way to check what version of the Mac OS a user is using? For example, I only want to install my software if they are using Mac OS X 10.4.3 or above. Thanks in advance. InstallationCheck or VolumeCheck scripts will work on any OS release. You can find scripts checking for this in some Apple's packages (QuickTime is the first to come to my mind). Use a VolumeCheck script if you want the user to set the installation target to a partition different from the startup one. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

1 0

Checking for system version
by adam_online＠mac.com 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com -Adam _______________________________________________ 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.… What is the best way to check what version of the Mac OS a user is using? For example, I only want to install my software if they are using Mac OS X 10.4.3 or above. Thanks in advance. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

1 0

Re: Packagemaker and Installer changes with Leopard ?
by Steven Lobo 03 Jan '07

03 Jan '07

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Hi Scott: > Yes, my understanding is that this would still be covered by NDA. I'm not fully sure of this. I recall from WWDC 06 that the Apple install engineers mentioned that the Packagemaker 3.0 features were open for discussion in the install mailing lists. Just wanted to reconfirm if this was still the case. Steven -----Original Message----- From: Scott Russell <ScottRussell(a)nd.edu> To: Steven Lobo <steven(a)robosoftin.com> Cc: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 07:48:08 -0500 Subject: Re: Packagemaker and Installer changes with Leopard ? > Hello Steven, > > On Jan 3, 2007, at 2:46 AM, Steven Lobo wrote: > > P.S. > > If Leopard Packagemaker/Installer changes are still too early to be > > discussed about in this forum, please let me know.. > > Yes, my understanding is that this would still be covered by NDA. > > Best wishes, > Scott > -- > Scott Russell > > IT Support Engineer, Distributed Support Services, > Office of Information Technologies, University of Notre Dame > Instructor of Horn, University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's College > Assistant Horn, South Bend Symphony Orchestra > > 205 DeBartolo Performing Arts Center > 574-631-2698 > ScottRussell(a)nd.edu > http://www.nd.edu/~srussel2/ > > > > > ----------------------------------------------- Robosoft Technologies - Come home to Technology _______________________________________________ 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

1 0