[vlc-devel] [PATCH] Make the Mac DMG prettier.

[Felix Paul Kühne]

Am 27.12.2011 um 05:04 schrieb Rafaël Carré:

>> The mounted dmg is only present for a few seconds while this script is running, so there is a high chance of not conflicting with anything running on the dev's box.
> 
> Using a path relative to our build directory, there is infinitely less chances of a conflict.
True, but I think this would solve a non-existing problem. Since 2004, I never heard a single person complaining about this...

> Also no knowledge of MacOSX internals is required since the mount point is explicited on the command line.
So, you guess that people try to compile who don't know /Volumes? Well, could be possible, but chances aren't that high I guess..

> 
>> Additionally, the needed option "-mountroot" (for the attach command) only understands path up to a total length of 90  characters, a limit which was only recently moved to 1024 characters…
> 
> Relative paths work: "a" is 1 character, it fits the lowest limit easily; but we can use something more explicit like "./mount" or whatever.
> 
> Did I convince you ?
Not really, since you need to pass an absolute path ;-)

More seriously, it's because of this:
The make script passes the dmg volume's name as an argument to osascript blabla. Within the AppleScript, 3rd line, there is "tell disk" which resolves to "tell disk "VLC-1.2.x"". I doubt that AS can resolve in a custom location as a volume correctly, but feel free to prove me wrong. Note that Brendon uses the Finder's AS suite here, which behaves the same way and can do the exact same things a user can do, just faster.
Let's push this some more: on the Mac, there's always exactly one volume with the exact same name. Let's say you open 2 VLC dmgs of the same version, both called "VLC-1.2.x". In the Finder, you'll see 2 volumes with the same name. Within /Volumes, you'll see one of them with a " 1" prefix. If you want to manipulate the you mounted later on, it'll be the one with the " 1" suffix. You can't guess this from any public API. You need to know that.
So, whatever you do with the custom mount point, the Finder will not be your friend here, but it's the only guy in this game who can do what you want: make the design more pretty..


>> There is another problem with Brendon's script which he mentioned in the related trac ticket: it requires the accessibility settings to be enabled on the box creating the dmg to let the AppleScript do the stuff he wants it to do.
>> At present, this script doesn't check for the enabled accessibility stuff and will utterly fail on Macs with the default configuration.
> 
> Will it fail with bad side effects?
Sorry, I withdraw that statement. I'll check another time on a clean account, but to my surprise, it works. Must have been the sleep deprivation last night...


Best regards,

Felix