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

Exactly.

On Sep 10, 2009, at 10:51 AM, Jaime Vargas wrote:

> 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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