Re: using dmg files (fwd)

[M. Uli Kusterer]

In article <mailman.4064.1096143491.1998.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>,
 Michael Baehr <mbaehr@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

 Yeah, Zipper.app sounds like a good tool. I wasn't necessarily talking 
about "exploring" the files (though WinZip-like viewing of an archive as 
just another folder definitely is a neat feature). I was talking more 
about something like how Finder 10.3 treats zip files:

 It has a default application that can zip/unzip files. Double-click a 
zip file and it will bring up a progress panel, unzip the file into a 
folder and that's it. Similarly, you can select a few files and then 
right-click and select "generate archive" to create a zip archive from 
them.

 If you allow archive browsing, that's great, but I think it should be 
made part of the standard distribution, and there should be a standard 
format for distributing applications for GNUstep.

> 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.

 Yeah, the thing with the graphics is kinda nifty. Though I'm not sure 
it'd work too well with GNUstep's variable system fonts etc.

 But it wouldn't be too hard to allow for a special file that contains 
view settings and a pathname to a desktop image in a .tar.gz file, and 
having the unpacking program look for such files and automatically turn 
them into whatever GWorkspace uses to keep track of that info. It's 
nothing that's unique to disk images.

 Disk images have a usability problem at their base: I've seen many 
users who were confused about that "weird new hard disk" showing up on 
their desktop. It's easier to tell people "This is a file that contains 
a compressed version of a folder, double-click to unpack the folder", 
than it is to explain to them that this is a packed version of a floppy 
disk that is virtually mounted on their desktop.

> 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;

 Yes, but a .pkg really only makes sense for applications and other 
executables, i.e. things that have a fixed location in the system's 
directory structure. Adding general support for .tar.gz or .zip or 
whatever would also allow users of GNUstep to easily distribute packed 
documents. It'd be easy to add Zipper.app to the general GNUstep 
distribution and make it the default for archives, and to add support to 
it for exporting view settings in the archive to GWorkspace, than it 
would be to drill open .dmg.

 I'm not even sure that'd be in your interest. In the past it was always 
pretty nice that you could tell what platform a file was for simply by 
looking at its archive's extension. .zip used to be Windows, .tar.gz or 
.tgz used to be Linux/Unix, and .sit or .dmg was MacOS.

 But if you just want to support unpacking .dmg files for better 
exchange with MacOS X, that's fine. I just don't think it's worth the 
hassle making this your official file format. Especially since many 
people these days use .zip instead.

Cheers,
-- Uli
http://www.zathras.de