Mac OS X For Unix Geeks, 4th Edition

Chapter 14. Creating and Distributing Installable Software

In Chapters 12 and 13, we discussed installing packages with Fink and MacPorts, respectively. This chapter shows you how to create packages using tools provided with Mac OS X, as well as with Fink and MacPorts.

The following options for distributing software are supported on Mac OS X by default:

gnutar and gzip

The Unix tape archive tool gnutar is used to bundle the directories and resources for distribution. (The tar command is provided as a hard link to gnutar.) GNU Zip (gzip) is used to compress the tar archives to make file sizes as small as possible. Using these tools is generally the simplest way to copy a collection of files from one machine to another.

Note

Mac OS X supports archiving files and directories in the .zip format directly from the Finder by Control/right-clicking on a file or directory and selecting “Compress” from the contextual menu.

Disk Utility

One of the easiest ways to distribute an application is to use the Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities) to create a disk image. You can use Disk Utility to create a double-clickable archive that mounts as a disk image on the user’s computer. From there, the user can choose to mount the disk image each time the application is run, copy the application to the hard drive (usually to /Applications), or burn the image to a CD. Disk Utility has a command-line counterpart, hdiutil, which we’ll cover in the later section Creating a Disk Image from the Command Line.”

PackageMaker ...