site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: installer-dev@lists.apple.com Since I kinda messed up on the subject line in the original ("Hi, All"), I thought I'd repost the thread under a proper title. Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful replies. Tiger Installer Plugin *----------------------- Since I have to work back to 10.2, this, while it sounds good, probably doesn't work for me. " like InstallShield on Windows" *------------------------------------ Yeah, that sort of thing sounds good. I don't know installshield that well, and I suppose I should admit that I am really a Windows developer, and sort of feeling my way around in the Mac/OS X world. But it did occur to me that since Installer is already capable of asking you for an install path, it seems that it wouldn't be too hard to configure one or two additional arbitrary fill in fields. "ask the user the first time it's run" *---------------------------------------- This is a good idea, except my client is kind of a silent agent sort of thing, and doesn't have any UI. "difficult to use that installer in any kind of automated situation" *---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Absolutely right, and I have figured out that I will have to provide a script-based install as well to satisfy this. In fact, that's how I was doing it initially, and got into installer when my local Mac user guinea pigs were fairly horrified at installing from a terminal window. Once I found Package Maker, my curiosity just pulled me along from there. Last thing I will mention, it does look like InstallAnywhere (commercial cross platform installer product) does provide for adding custom tabs of the sort that I'd like. I have no experience with it, but I might give it a try. Thanks again! == dj
Christopher Ryan <ryanc@apple.com> 5/25/2005 5:04 PM >>> Future ideas aside, the only way to do this in a "supported" fashion is to use an Installer Plugin introduced in Tiger.
These plugins let you add a "section" in the Installer. You cannot add UI "during" install, but you can add UI right before or right after the files get laid down. If you have Tiger, there is an "Installer Plugin" template in Xcode under the "Standard Apple Plug-ins" section of the new project dialog. If you have further questions feel free to ask, since there is little documentation other then the headers in the "InstallerPlugins.framework". Chris
Sure would be nice to do it like InstallShield on Windows does. You can have default values that are picked in the case of a silent install and use a script to populate the values too. If the install is not run silently then it would have forms to get the information. Then you can do silent or prompted installs.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Bierman" <bierman@apple.com> To: "Dave Johnson" <DDJOHNSON@novell.com> Cc: <installer-dev@lists.apple.com> Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 4:20 PM Subject: Re: Hi, All,
Why can't the client app/tool ask the user the first time it's run?
Adding user interaction during the install process makes it very difficult to use that installer in any kind of automated situation, such as university labs, ARD Managed environments, clusters, etc...
(See also: QuickTime registration panel during Software Update.)
For that reason we highly discourage people from launching interactive apps or tools from the pre/post scripts.
-pmb
At 1:29 PM -0400 5/25/05, Dave Johnson wrote:
Hi, All, Is running a separate application from e.g. preflight the only way to get user input during the install process?
This seems like a common need that Installer could handle, but I've not found any other way.
This post: http://lists.apple.com/archives/installer-dev/2005/Feb/msg00002.html seems to imply that launching an app is the only way.
My application is the client for a client-server application, and I need to tell it which server to connect to. I worked out an obscure way to do this using a Terminal window and shell script, from preflight, but it looks like Tiger breaks what I am doing.
A cocoa app to ask the question would look better anyway, but it just seems like overkill to have an entire application that ships in my install just to ask one little question and to get the result into a file (or an environment variable would probably do) so that postflight has it available for configuring the client app.
Thanks in advance for any help/advice/suggestions!
== dj
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