Greetings. I'm putting together a binary installer for Appscript and friends --- instead of installing seven different components, it will be able to be done in a single install without any dependencies on the developers tools being installed. The components being installed include: appscript, aem, carbonAE, HTMLTemplate, LaunchServices, osaterminology, and osax.
The basics of the install are simple, but there are a few subtleties that have come up, and I would like to solicit some feedback from you all on the following issues. ** Permissions ** Are there any special permissions that need to be respected? Specifically, do .so files need to be executable to work properly? Is there a reason that any of the .py files should need to be executed as a shell script? ** Licenses ** The installed components are licensed under the LGPL and Python licenses. My reading of these is that we just need to have links to the source versions on the same server that the binary is distributed from and we'll be ok. I wasn't going to have the user click-through a license agreement when installing the software (I find these annoying myself). ** Documentation and Support Apps ** Unlike the Python software components, which must be installed in /Library/Python/2.3, the helper apps (RenderTerminology and AppscriptTerminologyServer) and documentation for Appscript can be installed anywhere, or not at all. In particular, I could envision a user who wants to download and tweak/run an appscript but not actually write appscripts himself. There are basically two courses of action here, either install this stuff automatically or have the user do a drag install. In the first case, a default location for these should be specified. I would suggest /Application/Applescript/Python (/Applications/Applescript/Appscript is another option, but I find the similarity between Applescript and Appscript confusing). My preference, though, is to _not_ install these components, but provide them on the installer disk image. Anyone who is going to write appscripts should be comfortable with a drag install, and I generally prefer that installers only install things that are required to go in a particular place in the filesystem to work. Comments? Nick Matsakis _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
