[Pythonmac-SIG] For your eyes only: new 2.3rc1+ installer

[Jack Jansen]

[Barry, I'm cc'ing you on this to get your opinion on fixing the Mac 
binary distribution
infrastructure after 2.3 source is done]

On woensdag, jul 23, 2003, at 23:06 Europe/Amsterdam, Robin Dunn wrote:

> Jack Jansen wrote:
>> The fact that you can choose the installation disk is really a bug
>> (the welcome message states that you should only install to your boot
>> disk), but there's something wrong with the way we build the
>> installer package so that setting the "install on boot disk only"
>> flag causes more problems than it solves.
>
> I had this trouble too with the installer before you took it over.  It 
> worked fine on my box but not on others.  I also couldn' tfind any 
> answers about it so I also ended up not setting the flag...

It must be something in the buildpkg.py module that is simply wrong. 
The code was originally donated by Dinu Gherman for 10.1 (or maybe even 
10.0), who reverse-engineered the package format while writing it.

We can do one of three things:
1. Leave it as-is.
2. Try to debug what is going on, and how we should work around this.
3. Switch to using PackageMaker, but it appears not to be scriptable:-(

Note that 2 and 3 are real options, as the binary installer could be 
considered not to be in the critical path for the 2.3 source 
distribution, which is the one that absolutely has to be done before 
August 1. The downside of fixing things in the binary installer after 
the 2.3 source distribution goes out is that it means that it is 
impossible to create an identical binary distribution given only a 
source distribution. But I think this is already the case for the 
Windows binary distribution too, and it's definitely true for the 
MacPython-OS9 binary distribution. And the only reason I can think of 
why other people would dream of doing a binary distribution would be 
that I get hit by a tram, in which case this will be the least of my 
worries:-)

Opinions?
--
- Jack Jansen        <Jack.Jansen at oratrix.com>        
http://www.cwi.nl/~jack -
- If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma 
Goldman -