I don’t want installers!
This has been brought to my attention on the Cocoa dev list lately. Apple says…
The installation package based mechanism is the preferred method for delivering products in Mac OS X. This model is a change for experienced Mac OS X developers and packagers. Before Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard), the preferred software delivery mechanism was the manual install, where users drag the product from its container, a disk image, onto their file system. However, managed installs (which are steered by the Installer application after the user opens an installation package) on Leopard clients make possible advanced installation-management features, such as better package management through the Installer package database, downloadable packages, and certificate-based signing. Leopard leverages these features to provide users an improved install experience.
IMO that’s a terrible terrible move. I personally loved the simplicity and beauty of dragging a new application into the applications folder. Drag and Done! I was so happy to get away from this installer madness from Windows. Granted – upgrading apps was a pain until AppFresh appeared on the scene. But now installers are coming back to hunt us down on OSX? What about uninstalls? IMO they should have integrated AppZapper / AppDelete into the OS instead. Or go with a proper package management systems we know from Linux distributions so well. “apt-get dist-upgrade” *sigh*
Oh, well! Using unpkg might come handy more and more often then.