Snow Leopard and instaDMG

First off: I know that the later builds (200 and so) were failing entirely on the Snow Leopard seedings. They made some changes in the installer that completely break with chroot jails. I have bugs filled, and they are still outstanding. I am not completely sure how to handle this without regressing to failing on a number of packages. At some point I will take another stab at it, but it is going to be a while.

Actually SIU is part of the MacOS X Server Admin Tools, which you can download for free from Apple with no dependancies on MacOS X Server at all. You might even be able to use SIU on MacOS X 10.5 (but I am not going to bet on it working). You can download them here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL914

I wrangled my way on to the ‘Server seeding group just so that I could watch that part of SIU mature. Unfortunately it had a really rocky path, and I need to run a test tonight (like right now) to make sure that the bugs I reported against it actually got fixed in the late-stage builds. For instance iLife’09 would kill a build.

I had high hopes that Apple would take away the need for InstaDMG, but unfortunately I don’t feel that that is the case. For very simple installs, it will probably work just fine, but for complex ones it really does not fit the bill. For example:

1) You can’t re-order packages. The order you add them in the item is the order they will get installed. You have to delete everything after the point you want to insert a package in to get it there.

2) I don’t believe that they are using anything like chroot jails to handle non-distribution scripts that reference /.

3) I think that they still have the same problems that InstaDMG has with distribution scripts like iLife updaters.

So createUser has a systemversion-check witch didn’t like SL, a simple change in 2 lines made it rock (changed 10.5 to 10.6 in two places), now im testing if my image works. : ) The proper way is to make the right if-statements but im to lazy and probably short of knowledge..

well, and this is only a small item, it should work if your building 10.6 on 10.6
I … in a fit of stupidity, am trying 10.6 build with the build machine running 10.5
so… I changed only one of the two items to 10.6
the other I left as 10.5
course I COULD just do away with the check completely and tell it that its running leopard and let it go from there….. that would work too…. and its cleaner.

I just used my 1.4b3 script and my custom packages and InstaDMG worked fine. I didn’t put in any updates in it. I did modify my instauser package, as noted in previous posts. But this seemed to work fine. I got some strange output in my terminal window, but overall it looks fine.