[Ohrrpgce] .dmg format for Distribute Game on Mac

Tue Jul 7 22:03:31 PDT 2015

.pkg might be a good option. However it is OS 10.5+ only, while we support
10.4 too (hopefully; I don't know whether anyone has ever tested it).
However dropping support for 10.4 seems acceptable, since a veeeery tiny
number of OSX Intel users will stubbornly remain on 10.4. I have seen
websites with software like firefox compiled or backported to those old
versions, but I think it is mainly for PPC users.

However the improvement of .pkg over .zip seems so small that it's not
worth the trouble. Though I don't know what Installer can do; I don't think
I've ever used it.

The Mac app store is still very new, I would think there are very few Mac
users out there who don't know what a .dmg file is. Is the app store
actually that popular? I thought that there were extra limitations on
programs in the app store, similar to iOS or the Windows Store, so that not
all software can be distributed through it.

On 8 July 2015 at 04:22, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:

> I was concerned that .zip would not work because it discards the
> executable bit... however, I just did a test, and it looks like I can
> export a game as a Mac .app on Windows, zip it up, and copy it over to my
> Mac, and it extracts and runs just fine. Apparently unzipping on Mac just
> sets the executable bit on every dang file, so the .app still works just
> fine.
>
> So maybe just zipping the .app up is the simplest thing we should do.
>
> My focusing in .dmg is because that is what I have come to expect for Mac
> apps, but that is based on experience that is many years old now. These
> days Mac users expect their apps to be in the Mac app store, so I imagine
> that the average Mac user hardly ever sees .dmg files anyway.
>
> ---
> James
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 8:52 AM, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I had actually forgotten about the compression, so I've been looking into
>> it.
>>
>> I was surprised to see on the man page for mkisofs that it can create HFS
>> (not HFS+) file system images, because those are used by Apple for CDs.
>> The .dmg file format is called UDIF, which is a wrapper around a file
>> system image which may be HFS/HFS+, FAT, and so on. The HFS+ file system
>> itself seems to be fairly well supported in Linux. Unfortunately the
>> compression of an .dmg is added by UDIF, not HFS (though HFS also supports
>> compression). And UDIF is undocumented and there are almost no 3rd party
>> tools for dealing with it (I only saw ones for reading, not writing); the
>> best I could find was http://newosxbook.com/DMG.html
>>
>> I don't think .dmg.zip would make much sense (Why not just use .zip?)
>> even if it were true that OSX magically accepts .isos.
>>
>> On 8 July 2015 at 03:17, <ziggythehamster at outlook.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  MacOS X doesn't primarily rely on file extensions. Renaming an ISO to
>>> DMG doesn't do anything. You could rename it .jpg and it'll still be an ISO
>>> disk image.
>>>
>>> You pretty much have to use hdiutil on a Mac to make DMGs. You would
>>> have better luck making a .pkg (really, the gzipped variant) that installs
>>> to /Applications. I believe all you need to make a .pkg is gzip, cpio, and
>>> an XML plist creator. All of which work on every platform.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 7:26 AM -0700, "James Paige" <
>>> Bob at HamsterRepublic.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>    Annd. I remembered why that wouldn't work. No compression. I feel
>>> like TMC discovered all of this years ago, and I am just now remember what
>>> he said and thinking that I am figuring it out myself ;P
>>>
>>>  Would a zipped dmg be more or less confusing than a tar.gz?
>>>
>>>  Also, is anybody even getting these mailing list posts? I never get
>>> copies of my own, so I don't even know if the list server is working right
>>> now.
>>>
>>> ---
>>>  James
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 3:01 PM, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     I just discovered/remembered something really nifty.
>>>
>>>  So the reason we went with .tar.gz on Mac was because we couldn't
>>> figure out how to create .dmg files.
>>>
>>>  .dmg files are normally Disk images formatted as HSF+ and although
>>> tools for formatting as HSF+ exist on Windows and Linux, we could not find
>>> any good simple ones that we could redistribute.
>>>
>>>  Turns out that the important thing about a .dmg file is that it is a
>>> disk image. HFS+ happens to be the preffered format, but any format
>>> supported by Macs should work.
>>>
>>>  In particular, .iso works.
>>>
>>>  I tried building a .iso image, renamed it to .dmg, and my Mac was able
>>> to open it smoothly with no problems at all.
>>>
>>>  Tools to generate .iso images are far more ubiquitous, so maybe we can
>>> find one that we can redistribute and we can use it to build .dmg files
>>> directly from the Export Games menu :)
>>>
>>> ---
>>>  James
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>
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