illogic-al.Org

Make what so? OS X packages of course! This weekend (actually Labor Day for all us Yanks) a little rose pricked me and reminded me about those packages I was supposed to be making. The friendly poke gave me the activation energy needed to get over the hurdle and get the job started again. That's a little in-joke for the Chem geeks in attendance.

After completing the packages late Tuesday morning, I solicited a tester from Twitter and discovered I'd delivered my grand masterpiece two packages short. After ironing that little mistake I got some pretty good feedback which I will reprint for the audience below, verbatim.

Also: this is the only app in human history to have a worse install method than Adobe CS :D

Two things, 1) that was absolutely true and 2) it absolutely sucked. You probably have to use a mac for a while and then install an Adobe app to get it. Trust me though, it's bad. I didn't actually realize how bad until I tried to install it myself. Good gravy! Julian deserves a medal for installing let alone giving other feedback. The installation procedure SUCKED (but I've said this before).

Because of all this I find myself now working on a proper installer. It's a painful thankless job but somebody's got to do it. Want to know how much my life sucks right now? Here's a walk through my typical packaging day:

port info package
cd /path/to/package/portfile/dir
port build package +options

At this point macports either goes off to build the package, or in the case where the pacakge has already been built, it creates a symbolic link in the directory holding to Portfile to a work directory. Now remember, I'm smart. I've told macports to stop automatically cleaning the work directories by modifying an option in /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf. After the port builds I trundle on.

cd work
open .

At this point I have PackageMaker open (thank you Xcode!) and I drag the destroot directory from Finder into PackageMaker's main window. Now all I have to do is modify Choice Name, Initial State, set the Description, click Build and Run to create a test package, click through to see that it works and then move on to the next package. That takes a while, let's say 10 - 15 minutes. That doesn't take into account the time needed to build the package mind you. Now let's multiply by 50. Sucks, doesn't it? This is my life. I despise you all.