Re: Status of Installer.app?

[Adrian Robert]

On Feb 14, 2005, at 6:34 PM, Frederico Muñoz wrote:

> The Installer I'm making relies on bundles to support different 
> package formats. The expected package info is put on a protocol and 
> bundles must adhere to it, thus the actual mechanism of getting the 
> info (that is highly dependent on the packaging format) is abstracted. 
> My main testing bundle is the .deb one, but e.g. I make a Pkg bundle 
> that could read NeXT/OPenStep .pkg's (see a somewhat old example at 
> http://www.gesal.org/gnustep/installer_pkg.jpg). This can be extended 
> to any packaging format.

Thanks, I'll look this over, and try helping if I can.  I'm most 
interested in the .pkg format since I want to make just one package 
that Hatters, Debian people, etc. can all install on their systems.  
(If an app gets "healthy" enough, distribution maintainers will 
hopefully package it specifically for each distribution anyway.)  Are 
we legally able to use .pkg for GNUstep?


> For the multiple steps sequence a problem arises. My idea would be to 
> have a bundle that supported the OSX .pkg format (basically the NeXT 
> format on steroids, with preFlight, postFlight, available volume size 
> checking,etc). This however has a great impact on the UI. I chose from 
> the begining to base my work on the NeXT installer, that basically 
> presents all the info and then lets you install.

I meant multiple steps on the "back end" -- e.g., install a framework, 
run a script that builds a package or tool using this library, install 
that, etc..  Maybe not that necessary..  I think NeXTstep just put such 
things in separate install packages, and that wasn't that bad.