May 2008 - Installer-dev - lists.apple.com

image creation
by Jennie Henzel 15 May '08

15 May '08

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com When creating images, apparently the prevailing theory is that you should create an image for each form factor - use an emac to create an emac image, ibook G4 - ibook G4 image, etc. I am trying to understand if the reason for that was if there was something unique to the OS for each form factor or if it was what happened after the OS was installed during the process of installing all the other components of the image. I work in a school where we have iBook G4's, eMacs, MacBooks and Intel iMacs. Thank you. _______________________________________________ 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: Problem creating a meta package via command line in Leopard
by Stéphane Sudre 14 May '08

14 May '08

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Hi, Marshall E. suggested a workaround for this a few days ago: _______________________________________________ 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 May 14, 2008, at 12:02 PM, Floris Klinkert - FabFilter Software Instruments wrote: When creating our OS X installers, we use shell scripting to create a meta package, like this: -build -v -mi Packages/ -p MyMetaPackage.mpkg -r Resources/ -i Info.plist -d Description.plist The script worked perfectly in OS X 10.4, but when used in 10.5 it tells me "ERROR: No packages to build.". Any idea on how to get this working again? Thanks! "[...] As far as I can tell, the "Backwards-Compatibility Mode" for metapackage creation is broken in PackageMaker 3. It always results in a "No packages to build" error. I have been working around it by installing Xcode 2.5 in a separate folder and specifying the full path to its PackageMaker binary in an included file in my scripts. (Note that Tools/packagemaker in Xcode 2.5 is a symlink to PackageMaker in /Developer/Utilities, regardless of where you install Xcode 2.5; I ran into this and initially thought PackageMaker was broken in 2.5 as well.)[...]" This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Problem creating a meta package via command line in Leopard
by Floris Klinkert - FabFilter Software Instruments 14 May '08

14 May '08

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421) Hi, Any idea on how to get this working again? Thanks! Floris _______________________________________________ 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.… When creating our OS X installers, we use shell scripting to create a meta package, like this: -build -v -mi Packages/ -p MyMetaPackage.mpkg -r Resources/ -i Info.plist -d Description.plist The script worked perfectly in OS X 10.4, but when used in 10.5 it tells me "ERROR: No packages to build.". This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Is VolumeCheck possibly called before InstallationCheck completed?
by Julian Qian 14 May '08

14 May '08

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Dkim-signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=domainkey-signature:received:received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition; bh=WeCckrVXC9MoHbY7RxClDMqNI0ny5Cf0gfdLYbm2JX0=; b=jctpvxT7LxMVzkNm1Y3KD/b7TPZuCh5ncPJ55Ed7LeVN4Cn20k30vRc6gAnaYccrks4hoSQ6huh9VZCa7qWLCjexyaA8C4XaCQEBmOc74hZODyxliUK4dt+kaawjqREfTlcYMfJSjFoWUA3Pv1ImI1l3iWAleCT9ZDT5BKBg04E= Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=message-id:date:from:to:subject:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition; b=Wg5dUjNQw55h8kah1kj/ds3cSCSGVp/gEV5uAKgv9VtqP7qRW9+hQviBigLVYqdKzN0oS3t2Ml+GCd5nTx6pw6kQXjwyL4P2N0eUATIUwoZbDuU5A+WEabRpR6UY6Pwb3bHL9JZgaY1791FDDQsqpTHLjv2J55hPvVXjxq2mrrw= I know InstallationCheck is defautly called before VolumeCheck when running installer. However, when I am writing some installer script, I found VolumeCheck script often began to run before InstallationCheck was totally completed. It caused some unexpected issues and bothered me toughly. Is it a apple's bug? Does someone also encounter this situation or know about it? Please give me a help. Thanks in advance. My environment is: iMac5,1 Mac OS X 10.5.2 and totally 4 volumes mounted. _______________________________________________ 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: writing files as root from Installer Plugin
by Toby Blake 12 May '08

12 May '08

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Hi again, Cheers Toby -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. _______________________________________________ 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 would not reccomend doing anything as root in an Installer Plugin. Apart from the fact that you would need to get proper authorization from the user (in addition to what the rest of the installer package requires) the Installer Package runs before any installation actually takes place. Many thanks to you all for the useful advice on this issue. Looks like my best bet is to copy the file in place in a postflight script. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: writing files as root from Installer Plugin
by Bill Coderre 10 May '08

10 May '08

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.… This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: writing files as root from Installer Plugin
by Mike Fischer 10 May '08

10 May '08

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Sorry for the late reply... Am 09.05.2008 um 21:04 schrieb Toby Blake <toby(a)inf.ed.ac.uk>: Hi again, I hope this is the appropriate list to send this to - it's perhaps more of a general cocoa programming question, so feel free to direct me elsewhere. One thing my installer plugin needs to do is take input from the user, validate it and write it out to a file. There's every possibility that this file could be only writable by root on any given system, so my plugin needs to get appropriate authorization for the user to write this file as root. HTH Mike -- Mike Fischer Softwareentwicklung, EDV-Beratung Schulung, Vertrieb Note: I read this list in digest mode! Send me a private copy for faster responses. _______________________________________________ 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 would not reccomend doing anything as root in an Installer Plugin. Apart from the fact that you would need to get proper authorization from the user (in addition to what the rest of the installer package requires) the Installer Package runs before any installation actually takes place. So the user might decide to cancel the installation after the plugin has run and expect no modifications to his system. Getting root authorization is awkward for the user. And you would need complicated code including a separate process as you can't change the rights of the currently running process to root AFAIK. Great care would need to be placed into making sure that this code couldn't accidentily do anything bad. All in all a whole lot of trouble for something rather ugly. I had a similar problem for a project a while ago. Not having found any other way to communicate information from the Installer Plugin to the postflight script I solved it by having the plugin write a file with a known and (hopefully) unique name (containing a UUID) to /tmp and then parsing the content of this file in my postlight script (which runs as root in my installer package). By writing to /tmp I can be sure that the file will be cleaned up at some point in time even if my code doesn't get the chance. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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Re: writing files as root from Installer Plugin
by Stéphane Sudre 09 May '08

09 May '08

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Hi again, I hope this is the appropriate list to send this to - it's perhaps more of a general cocoa programming question, so feel free to direct me elsewhere. One thing my installer plugin needs to do is take input from the user, validate it and write it out to a file. There's every possibility that this file could be only writable by root on any given system, so my plugin needs to get appropriate authorization for the user to write this file as root. I've read the doc "Performing Privileged Operations With Authorization Services", but this seems to be C only. It appears that the Objective-C way would be to use SFAuthorizationm but docs on this seem a little thin on the ground. What I'd really like to see is some sample code. Does anyone have such a thing? Or is there perhaps a better way to achieve what I want to do? Or should I just use a chunk of C in my plugin? Many thanks in advance and apologies for the vagueness of my questions. _______________________________________________ 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 May 9, 2008, at 1:05 PM, Toby Blake wrote: Assuming your package requires root authentication (or admin depending on the terminology) _and_ the position of this file can not change, then a solution is to just write the file and then use a postflight script to fix the permissions (and eventually move it to another location that would have required to be root to do it). If you require root authentication, the postflight script will be run as root. This should avoid asking the user to enter twice his/her password. This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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writing files as root from Installer Plugin
by Toby Blake 09 May '08

09 May '08

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com Hi again, I hope this is the appropriate list to send this to - it's perhaps more of a general cocoa programming question, so feel free to direct me elsewhere. One thing my installer plugin needs to do is take input from the user, validate it and write it out to a file. There's every possibility that this file could be only writable by root on any given system, so my plugin needs to get appropriate authorization for the user to write this file as root. I've read the doc "Performing Privileged Operations With Authorization Services", but this seems to be C only. It appears that the Objective-C way would be to use SFAuthorizationm but docs on this seem a little thin on the ground. What I'd really like to see is some sample code. Does anyone have such a thing? Or is there perhaps a better way to achieve what I want to do? Or should I just use a chunk of C in my plugin? Many thanks in advance and apologies for the vagueness of my questions. Cheers Toby -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. _______________________________________________ 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: Customising install order using InstallerSections.plist
by Toby Blake 09 May '08

09 May '08

site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev(a)lists.apple.com My InstallerSections.plist file looks like this: <key>SectionOrder</key> <array> <string>Introduction</string> <string>ReadMe</string> <string>License</string> <string>TargetSelect</string> <string>PackageSelection</string> <string>Install</string> <string>myplugin.bundle</string> <string>Summary</string> </array> Silly question too: What does happen if you change "TargetSelect" to "Target"? >From what I'm seeing on my Tiger system, if I use "TargetSelect", Installer.app stalls in the "Preparing installation" step after displaying some incorrect information and skipping the Installation Type step. Fantastic - this seems to be the answer - many thanks for that. Cheers Toby -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. _______________________________________________ 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 got these names from Installer.app/Contents/Plugins) This email sent to site_archiver(a)lists.apple.com

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