[Ohrrpgce] .dmg format for Distribute Game on Mac

Wed Jul 8 15:33:35 PDT 2015

As a Mac user and developer who uses OS X exclusively, I almost never use 
the Mac App Store.

Here’s what I’d find acceptable:

1. A ZIP file with an .app inside it. Drag the .app to Applications on 
your own. I believe GitHub.app is distributed this way.
2. A DMG with an .app inside it. Also include a symlink to /Applications 
so you do less work to install.
3. A .pkg either inside a DMG or not.

It would be weird if you put a DMG or ISO in a .ZIP file. I would think 
whoever is distributing this package doesn’t know what they’re doing.

Knowing some of the historical bits of the OHRRPGCE, I think making an 
Installer package would be the better way to go, as you could make the 
Installer package keep the engine in a shared location so the .apps 
themselves are smaller or less complicated. ~/Library/Application 
Support/OHRRPGCE/Engines/version for example. I also don’t know if the 
OHRRPGCE generates .apps or not. If not, then start there. It’s totally 
acceptable to generate a .app and then ZIP that up…but if you’re expecting 
me to double-click a shell script to launch the game, that’s not right. :)

From:  Michael Kidder
Reply-To:  <ohrrpgce at lists.motherhamster.org>
Date:  Wednesday, July 8, 2015 at 2:27 AM
To:  <ohrrpgce at lists.motherhamster.org>
Subject:  Re: [Ohrrpgce] .dmg format for Distribute Game on Mac

clarification: meant Mac Pro, I still keep calling them all Power Macs

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 4:21 AM, Michael Kidder <mkidder at gmail.com> wrote:
http://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/os-x-market-share-statistics-1-in-5
-macs-still-unsupported/

It looks like 10.4 is a vanishingly small userbase. My developer buddy 
runs one of the earlier Intel PowerMacs that came with 10.4 and even he 
can get up to 10.7

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 12:03 AM, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> 
wrote:
.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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