As much as I’m getting to like my iMac, time to dutifully call Apple down for the piece of crap they pass off as a package system. While it does have some very adorable facets, and when it works right, it’s a delight to use, and unlike previous Mac installers – which either worked or didn’t – it actually exposes a log so you can tell why it fails now … Knowing why it failed doesn’t actually help.
For instance, I am unable to try out the installers for our game on my iMac. Why? Because I can’t find a way to tell it not to try and install to where I previously built the application.
Starting file extraction Extracting…
Diverting “./World War ][ Online Beta.app” to “/playnet/pn/ww2/WW2OL/proj/mac/build/Debug/World War ][ Online.app”
Diverting “./World War ][ Online Beta.app/AppData” to “/playnet/pn/ww2/WW2OL/proj/mac/build/Debug/World War ][ Online.app/AppData”
BomFileError 2: No such file or directory – /playnet/pn/ww2/WW2OL/proj/mac/build/Debug/World War ][ Online.app/AppData
Yeah, that’s really not what I want it to do. I’ve been trying for the last 2 weeks to figure out how to tell it not to do that. I’m not the only person – apparently Apple’s installer-dev mailing list doesn’t know either.
I’m at a bit of a loss as to where the “registry” is – whatever is tracking that old, dead, non-existent build location, if I could find that I could maybe nip it in the bud.
Meh. I’ll just have to stick to manually copying the contents of the installer over.
On the plus side, Apple’s voice recognition works rather nicely out of the box, although it has a few problems with my non-American accent. Yeah, I know, speech recognition = gimmick, who the heck wants to talk to their computer when mouse and keyboard are quieter (if you don’t count Doc), faster and less error-prone (again, not counting Doc here).
All true, but now I’m using Synergy it’s really handy being able to drive the Mac without having to switch to it. For instance, I can copy a whole bunch of text on my Win or Lin box and say “Paste that” and voila, it gets dropped into the focused text-based app on the Mac. And … it is kinda handy being able to crank up the font size, open my browser and verbally work thru my favorites list while eating my McSkillet Burrito without getting grease all over the keyboard and mouse…
kfsone's pittance 
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The installer has always been a pain in the butt. RickB hated it with a passion as well.
I think what it’s doing is checking for the latest version of the application and using that; it’s really ignoring the install location as far as I can see. I have to manually delete the built versions to do the install.
One thing you might do is build it one an external drive, build the installer, then unmount the external drive. Ugh….
No, it’s deeper than that. The path it’s trying to install to (/playnet/pn/ww2/WW2OL_1.28.0.255/proj/mac/build/Debug/) doesn’t exist and hasn’t existed for over a week. That’s where I first built a Mac build. Rick has a whole bunch of .app stuff (Info.plist etc) in the proj folder and it seems like it’s not only building that but actually installing it to the build directory… I think I may have future-proofed it, by changing the data in the proj/mac/Info.plist file to a different product key (com.playnet.wwiiol-dev) because that’s what it’s matching with (I spent an hour futzing around with XML files in the wwiiol000012902.pkg folder and found that when I changed Contents/Resources/something-or-other’s product key, suddenly it would install)
I did some real poking at it and I managed to find out that it’s using “Receipts” to determine the original location but I can’t figure the receipts out any deeper than that, and it appears that the actual receipt for the product is stored in a binary .db file under /Library/ which I daren’t futz with…
Very, very annoying. The NeXT is strong in Installer.
Oh, and scratch the ability to control iTunes: The Mac doesn’t do that neat thing some Windows apps will do and filter it’s own sound out, so after I say “play music” all the Mac can hear is itself.