site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Installer-dev@lists.apple.com Like you, we have a non-trivial install that needs to install to global dirs as well as user sub dirs. The approach that we've been using for a few years that's worked very well from 10.4 and up is the following: 1) Have your preflight do something like: rm /tmp/_user_home ln -s "${HOME}" /tmp/_user_home 2) Have your installer install everything with absolute paths, and for stuff that's going into the user home sub dir, just use a path like /tmp/_user_home/Library/foo 3) And have your postflight cleanup: rm /tmp/_user_home Andy On Nov 14, 2011, at 9:04 PM, Rich Morin wrote:

I'm using Apple's PackageMaker (3.0.3, on Leopard) to create an installer. Basically, it needs to put some files into $HOME/Library/SketchUp and then copy a file up into SketchUp's plugins directory. No problem, eh?

The last time I did this, I spent a couple of weeks in research and hack mode: look for documentation, try to get things to work as described, rinse, repeat.

Eventually, I had an installer that worked as desired. Because of the hassle and pain, I ignored some minor issues, such as the location of installed file trees.

Specifically, although I set the Destination to "/" in PackageMaker, the files were installed relative to the user's home directory. This seemed odd, but I was happy enough to get it working that I shrugged and went on.

Fast forward to the present. I built another installer and tried it out on a Lion system. Hmmmm; Lion installs files relative to "/". So, I fudged the file tree to go into /tmp/SketchUp and did a copy to $HOME/Library from there. But wait; what am I supposed to do about Leopard?

One option is to create a (/-relative) installer for Lion and another ($HOME-relative) one for Leopard. Then check to see how Snow Leopard behaves and document accordingly.

This seems a bit awkward and error-prone. If the user isn't careful in downloading, things will break. Yes, I can check for this and display a nastygram, but...

Another option is to build things for Lion and fudge the post-install script for Leopard. If the installer put the file tree in $HOME/tmp/..., I simply copy from there. Of course, if the user already had a $HOME/tmp directory, things might get a bit wonky...

I tried installing Xcode 4 on my Lion system, in the hope that it would have a new, improved version of PackageMaker. No luck there. Some Googling indicated that, in 2008, the PackageMaker distribution had been moved into the iOS SDK.

Not sure whether I want to spend the money and hassle to find out whether this is (still) the case. Anyone know?

More to the point, what's the best way to proceed at this point? This is beginning to look like a tarpit...

-r -- http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume rdm@cfcl.com http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841

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