[Icecast] an OS X installer

[Jaime Magiera]

On Mar 14, 2005, at 5:28 PM, Dan Stowell wrote:

> I don't want to pour water on this idea since a nice installer would
> be helpful for the "less-techy" (had to climb a pretty steep learning
> curve myself...).

no worries. These are just observations.

> But I do want to point out that both "fink" and "darwinports" provide
> nice ways to install UNIX software such as icecast onto OS X, and they
> magically fulfill the dependencies etc. Are you aware of those? It's
> true that they are still primarily command-line tools,

In a way, that reinforces the point. The Mac experience, until 
recently, did not include a terminal. There were a few terminal based 
applications/environments (Common LISP/MUSIC and a few pseudo-unixes), 
but for the most part, it was all graphical. A traditional Mac user 
didn't think along those lines. In general, installation of 
applications was a straightforward process. You clicked a button, the 
installer let you know if there were any dependencies or necessary 
restarts -- and boom -- you get to watch the fuzzy blue thermometer. 
Basically, I'm describing the same steps as the terminal installer, 
minus a few important graphical cues. However, those cues, and the 
overall presentation of the installer, really color the user 
experience. Apple seems to have made a consistent effort to keep the 
terminal-esque aspects of BSD hidden as much as possible. Which is 
probably a good idea. Many Mac users don't really even know what a 
terminal is. Generally, apps are installed from a disk image; some by 
dragging the image to the "Applications" folder, some by clicking on an 
actual installer.  Even in OS X Server,  Apple tries to move away from 
the terminal (though not so successfully yet).

It's not a big deal by any means. However, I'd be willing to wager that 
Icecast would substantially increase its Mac user base with a simple 
GUI installer. Would make my life easier to :)

> Personally, I've no idea how to go about creating an OSX installer.
> Would it even be able to check and fulfill dependencies? Or would it
> simply need to carry all the other libraries along with it?

You could go either route. There are installers that can check 
installed components (by checking in /Library/Receipts/ or in this 
case, the typical BSD paths). If you did it without including the 
dependent libs, the installer can pop up a window saying "You cannot 
install on this disk because [you don't have libxml installed]".  The 
installer can also provide for optional install components, where the 
dependencies could be installed after a version check. These features 
are actually provided by a preferred OS X method -- packages. They are 
created by /Developer/Applications/Utilities/PackageMaker.app and can 
have multiple pre- and post- install scripts attached to the them.

It wouldn't be hard to put an installer together. I was actually going 
to build one just for my own ease of use. I'd be willing to share that 
with folks on the list if the Icecast folks don't mind. If they do, 
I'll scrap the idea and say no more.

jaime