Re: Introducing myself, Who needs help?

["Michael A. Peters" <mpeters mac com>]

On Sat, 2005-10-29 at 13:49 -0400, Michael Steinfeld wrote:
> Hi, I just subscribed because I want to offer my services. I am much
> better at following suit than leading the pack. You can review my
> resume at
> http://www.poordog.net/resume.php
> 
> I would prefer to contribute OS X related packages.. however tell me
> what needs to be done and I'm on my way regardless of OS.

Been awhile since I used OS X - but if you want to package for OS X, I
beg you to use Apple's PackageBuilder app (I think that's what its
called - been awhile since I used Apple) - the one that makes packages
you install through their installer.

Drag and Drop installers are nice and all that, but I saw a lot of
people who had improper ownerships because they run as admin and just
drag and drop - resulting in files owned by their user which shouldn't
be (and its dangerous as result - it eliminates the unix permission
based security that keeps stuff from writing to those files)

Also - it seems like a lot of packagers for OS X - including big $$$
commercial vendors - create installers that (pardon my french) f*** up
the permissions - like they just don't care and expect users to run that
fix-permissions script.

I've seen installers that will just chmod -R 777 /Application -
intentionally or not, I don't know - but its really a sign of
incompetence to screw up permissions when installing something.

Back when I was packaging software for OS X - the .pkg format was really
nice for multipackage stuff - I could create a .mpkg installer (I think
that was it) that contained several packages within it - that would
probably be the way to go with some gnome stuff.

But the Apple package thing is the right way - it easily installs with
correct ownership (root), lets you do pre/post scripts similar to what
rpm allows, etc. Only think I didn't like was it did not have an easy
uninstall, and no way to verify integrity of the package. That was back
in OS X 10.1 though.

But yeah - gnome packages for OS X would be sweet - at some point I'm
going to get a mac again, and I don't really trust fink - I like proper
packages.

Please note that I am in no way a representative of gnome, I just watch
the list.