[plt-scheme] Why .dmg for Mac source distributions?

FWIW, the current .dmg install works well and follows the convention  
of allowing a drag-and-drop install. Therefore, lowering the barrier  
of entry for "unexperienced" users. A unix install forces the user to  
get to know the command line. Given the project educational goals the  
current choice works well.

On Sep 10, 2009, at 10:09 AM, Eli Barzilay wrote:

> On Sep  9, Peter Michaux wrote:
>> I have downloaded and installed MzScheme from the Mac source code
>> distribution. It really struck me as uncommon that a source is
>> distributed in a dmg file. I've been using OS X and installing
>> various software for quite a while and haven't encountered a dmg
>> being used for this purpose before. A tarball is usual and the same
>> tarball is used for *NIX.
>>
>> A tarball is certainly easier to deal with from the OS X command
>> line.  For the disk image, just getting to the source code requires
>> mounting an unmounting the image which causes Finder to flip around
>> a bit.
>
> I don't remember how exactly I got to have the osx source
> distributions as dmg files -- I probably looked around and found some
> projects that did the same.  (Note that I don't use OSX, and I don't
> know the conventions.)  Switching to a .tgz or .zip is easy, and if
> anyone has an opinion, or better -- knowledge about the right choice,
> then please tell me.
>
>
> On Sep 10, Noel Welsh wrote:
>>
>> I find different people use OS X in very different ways. I use it
>> like a Unix box w/ Emacs, tarballs etc. Some of my friends use
>> little GUI apps when perfectly acceptable CLI apps exist, under
>> powered text editors like Smultron etc. Clearly they have weak
>> minds. I expect they'd prefer a disk image over a tarball. You can
>> always download the Unix src tarball if you want.
>
> The thing is that the unix source won't have the C part of mred for
> OSX.
>
>
> On Sep 10, Jakub Piotr Cłapa wrote:
>>
>> I guess that the main advantage of dmgs is that they can hold any
>> metadata OS X can handle (including resource forks and more
>> conventional xattrs). This way someone won't break anything by using
>> some old tar program for unpacking (most UNIX tools before 10.4 did
>> not support any xattrs and resource forks; even cp). This problems
>> are not very important for source code.
>
> Right -- and specifically in the plt sources there are no uses of
> these.  (Otherwise maintenance of the build/distribute scripts would
> have been a PITA.)
>
>
>> On the other hand the default configuration of Safari automatically
>> "unpacks" dmg images just like tar.gz (leaving you with a folder in
>> Downloads).
>
> [That might be why I used it...  I don't remember the details, but I
> have this vague idea about .dmg files being good for downloading in
> some way.]
>
> -- 
>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli  
> Barzilay:
>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is  
> Life!
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