A DMG file.Whenever you need to create an installation package or distribution for Mac OS X 10.5 or later, Packages is the powerful and flexible solution you're looking for. If Composer contains a package manifest for the setting you want to capture, you can create a package source from it.I recently posted about some Suspicious Package Power User Features, which was a follow-up to my MacDevOps YVR presentation “ The Encyclopedia of Packages.”I know on windows there are a bunch of installer tools you can use to create an installer, but on Mac OS Ive seen two ways to install apps. You can create a package source that captures the look and feel of your computer’s interface, such as Dashboard, Display, and Global Preference settings. Creating Package Sources from the User Environment Settings.
Creating .Pkg Files Download The LatestYou can say I wrote the book about it. Posted on Categories Packaging, Tools Leave a comment on Suspicious Package 4.0 Update Suspicious Package Power User FeaturesAs many MacAdmins, I work a lot with installer packages. You check it out if you have not yet listened to that episode. As the FAQ correctly states, most users of packages or even the Suspicious Package application will not care much about the differences between the package formats, but for system administrators, this can determine the difference between a functional deployment or a broken workflow.The previously ‘secret’ option to show the PackageInfo xml file is now also exposed in the preferences window, next to the option to show the Distribution XML.It is now also easier to search for the contents of a particular component in a distribution package.You can download the latest version of Suspicious Package and get the update notes here.Many thanks to Randy Saldinger of Mothers Ruin Software for providing this amazing tool and further refining it!Randy was also recently a guest on the MacAdmins Podcast.I have always had reservations about Suspicious Package, though, because I thought there were a few missing features.Update (August 2021): The app has gotten a new major update (4.0) which makes these “power user features” even more accessible!The missing features were in connection with distinguishing “normal” or “component” packages (which have a single payload) from “distribution” or “meta” packages (which don’t have a payload of their own, but contain one or more component packages).I have explained the differences in a bit more detail in my MacDevOps YVR presentation “ The Encyclopedia of Packages” where I (once again, ignorantly) stated that you can’t really tell them apart in the UI of Suspicious Package.After that presentation, Mat X, one of the organizers of the conference got me in touch with the developer of Suspicious Package, Randy Saldinger, who graciously and patiently demonstrated that I was wrong.In my defense, you really cannot tell normal packages from distribution packages in the default configuration of Suspicious Package, but if I had bothered to read the manual and/or explore the Preferences window, I would have found this option:This will show the Distribution xml file at the top of the list of the ‘All Scripts’ pane for distribution packages. Many people love Suspicious Package from Mothers Ruin Software. It displays all of the content and resources of a pkg file in a very nice user interface. Kudos to Suspicious Package for using this.Many thanks to Randy for all his work and help and for providing an excellent tool! I am very much looking forward to the next version. Not many apps leverage this functionality, so we often forget to check for it. Together with showing the Distribution xml, this allows you to inspect all the raw metadata that can be inside a pkg file.I have also learned that you can use the search functionality in the “Help” menu of Suspicious Package which will link directly to the online documentation. It is not exposed in the UI (yet) but when you run: % defaults write com.mothersruin.SuspiciousPackage ShowRawPackageInfo -bool YESIn Terminal and re-launch Suspicious Package, you will see the raw PackageInfo xml in the “All Scripts” tab. But Randy shared another preference with me which puts it over the top. With “Component package and bundle info” enabled you can see which component contains the selected file in the info pane:You can also search in the “All Files” tab with command-F and use the component package ID as a search criteria.All of this is already well enough to remove the reservations I have had on Suspicious Package. Free mac utilities for cleanupThank you!For most end user level tasks, these tools will provide seamless experience. With Universal applications and Rosetta 2, Apple is providing very efficient tools to dramatically reduce the friction and problems involved.This post was inspired by comments from Josh Wisenbaker on MacAdmins Slack and Twitter. For the duration of the transition, developers and admins will have to deal with and support software and hardware for the Intel and Apple silicon Macs. The first time a user installs or launches a solution that requires Rosetta, they will be prompted to for installation and upon approval, the system will download and install Rosetta.As a MacAdmin, however, you want your deployments to be uninterrupted by such dialogs. In “normal” unmanaged installations, this is not a big deal. Rosetta is not pre-installed on a fresh macOS installation.We can only speculate why Apple chooses to deliver Rosetta this way. There are only a few situations where these tools don’t work: virtualization solutions and Kernel extensions.In most cases this tools will “just work.” But for MacAdmins there is one major issue that may throw a wrench in your well-oiled deployment workflows. An extra dialog and installation will make users and developers more aware of software that “needs an update” and motivate developers to provide Universal applications faster.When a user opens an application that requires Rosetta for the first time, before Rosetta is installed, the system prompts to install. One possible explanation is, that Apple believes Rosetta will not be a necessary installation for very long. Have this script run early in your deployment workflow on Apple silicon and subsequent apps and tools that require Rosetta should be fine.The other solution is to avoid requiring Rosetta and thus the prompt for Rosetta.I mentioned earlier that we can only speculate as to why Apple has made Rosetta 2 an optional installation. Graham Gilbert and Rich Trouton have already published scripts around this. Apple provides a new option for the softwareupdate command to initiate the installation. The first is to install Rosetta as early as possible in the deployment process. Distribution packages do not have a payload or installation scripts of their own, but contain one or more component packages. These packages have a payload and can have pre- and postinstall scripts, but other than that, there is little metadata you can add to influence the installation workflow.This is where “distribution packages” come in. The first are “plain” packages, which are also called component packages. I was curious what is required in the package to trigger or to avoid the prompt.Aside from legacy formats, there are two types of packages. However, not all packages trigger the dialog. The system might prompt to install Rosetta before a certain package is installed. Component pkgs have (among other files) a PackageInfo file and distribution pkgs have a Distribution file: # component pkg> pkgutil -expand component.pkg expanded_component_pkg> pkgutil -expand distribution. To tell them apart, you can expand a pkg with the pkgutil command and look at the files in the expanded folder. They are hard to distinguish even from the command line.
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