Flash player re-packaging & install preparation

[pteeter]

Can we get a consensus opinion about what version/parts of Flash Player get installed with

Tiger – 10.4.11 PPC
Tiger – 10.4.11 x86
Leopard – 10.5.2

The /Library/Internet Plug-ins folder appears to have a functional Flash player in it – in the form of Flash Player.plugin, Flash Player Enabler.plugin (Tiger PPC only?), and flashplayer.xpt.

In an effort to find the ‘best practice way’ of re-packaging the Flash Player installer, I have a feeling a preflight script must be written to clean up these files but am not certain.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

[Patrick Fergus]

We’re just distributing the following Universal Binary versions (via FileWave) on top of whatever Leopard installs:

/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player.plugin
/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/flashplayer.xpt

That’s going out to Tiger PPC, Tiger Intel, Leopard PPC, and Leopard Intel. Been out there for a few weeks and haven’t gotten any calls.

Flash Player Enabler.plugin seems to be ignored–we have many machines with the current revs of the above files plus FPE.plugin and they’re working fine. Nuking FPE.plugin would probably be cleaner, if you want to do that. Right now I’m of the philosophy to not attempt to fix our setup until it breaks.

Repackaging in your favorite pkg-making app would probably be a good idea, plus tacking on a preflight if you want to be sure the originals are dead and gone.

– Patrick

[pteeter]

Thanks for commenting guys.

I’m going to try preflight scripting the cleanup of all three Flash files. I figure removal of the Flash Player Enabler.plugin item will harmlessly error out on Intel.

I am intrigued about the UB nature of the Patrick’s installer.

So, the same installer (as in one instance of Flash Player.plugin and one instance of flashplayer.xpt) is used for 10.4 – PPC + x86 AND 10.5 – PPC + x86?

UPDATE: apparently the answer is a great big YES. Built the PKG on x86. Ran it on PPC. Plugin works on both, preflight script works too. So why the heck does Adobe make such a big deal about downloading different PowerPC and Intel installers for Flash? Do they know something we don’t or are they just being overly cautious? Or, as Josh suggested, obtuse for no good reason.

😉

[Patrick Fergus]

Maybe the PPC version of the Flash Player supports OS X <10.3? I know the UB works on 10.3+, PPC and Intel.

- Patrick

[pteeter]

Nigel Kersten brought this up on the MacEnterprise mailing list:

> >There are some exceptions though. Some Firefox apps come with a
> >flashplayer.xpt bundled inside the app itself, and this is what the Adobe
> >installer usually fails on with network/mobile accounts due to dropping
> >admin privileges and assuming the user has write permissions to the app
> >bundle.
> >
> >We resolve this with this postflight script.

[code]#!/bin/sh

PATH=/usr/bin:/bin

find /Applications -type f -name flashplayer.xpt -print0 | xargs -0 -J % -n
1 cp -Rfp /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/flashplayer.xpt “%”
[/code]

I haven’t investigated personally, but I’m sure Nigel is right.

[pteeter]

Because xargs scares me…not really. This is just another way to do the same thing…

[code]find /Applications -type f -name flashplayer.xpt -exec cp -Rfp /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/flashplayer.xpt {} \;[/code]

Will test today and fill in results.

[Author]

Posts