Re: using dmg files (fwd)

[Michael Baehr]

On Sat, 25 Sep 2004 21:02:58 +0200, M. Uli Kusterer <witness@t-online.de> wrote:
> In article <mailman.3872.1096019893.1998.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>,
>  Markus Hitter <mah@jump-ing.de> wrote:
> 
> > A .tar.gz file requires you to fiddle with the command line. Something
> > John Doe's grandma and even the average computer user isn't very savy
> > on.
> 
>  Uh... couldn't that be solved by simply providing a GUI around gnutar?
> Or even better, why not just integrate it with GWorkspace? Surely it
> wouldn't be too hard to allow unpacking an archive?
> 

You might want to take a look at Zipper.app.  It's a nice Renaissance
frontend to exploring and extracting several forms of archives,
including the venerable gzipped tarball.

>  I personally don't like disk images too much. They're simply the only
> compression and packing method that shipped with MacOS X 10.0 and didn't
> swallow Mac resource forks or require command-line access (StuffIt
> wasn't ready). 10.2 introduced support for .zip archives in the Finder,
> BTW. That's a much better approach, IMHO.

I still think disk images, for various reasons, are the best way to
package software for OS X.  They provide a way to create a completely
self-contained packaging environment, and you can see how this has
been used by many software distributors by creating custom
backgrounds, instructions in graphics, etc.  However, there's
absolutely nothing wrong with just distributing a file as a .pkg
installer, and as far as I know, the formats involved are pretty open;
at least the tools required are... I'm not sure about "pax"'s license
but I'm sure it's pretty agreeable to redistribution and modification.

> -- Uli

Mike

-- 
Michael Baehr - Arch Linux GNUstep Geek