Sami,

there is already an other pull requests on this topic, I think you guys should 
have a talk about it:

https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/231
https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/430

regards Domi


On 09.04.2012, at 21:58, Sami Tikka wrote:

> Evening,
> 
> I have been thinking about the Jenkins Mac installer. The current
> installer which uses the Apple Installer has some shortcomings:
> 
> 1) The installer is difficult to create. The old tool, PackageMaker
> was notorious for driving developers up the wall and the new packaging
> tools, while much better (so I hear), still have their limitations.
> 
> 2) It is not possible to customize the steps of the installation. The
> current Mac installer is quite rigid and does not fit everyone's use
> case. It does not allow us to prompt the user for more information to
> customize the installation process.
> 
> 3) It is difficult to install from the command-line. It is possible to
> do the installation over ssh using command-line only, but changing the
> default installation options is difficult.
> 
> 4) There is no uninstall.
> 
> I spent a little time experimenting with a different approach with the
> Mac installer. The result of the experiment can be seen in
> https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/430. Please do not merge it
> yet. Let's talk about it first.
> 
> This is just a prototype but it seems to work. Would we be interested
> in abandoning the Apple Installer approach and rolling our own
> installation utility?
> 
> The requirements placed on the installer by Jenkins seem to be very
> modest and everything that is required is an easy way to unpack the
> files where they belong, possibly set up a user and permissions and
> configure a launchd job. I'm not sure what exactly is the benefit we
> are getting from using Apple Installer and given the cons I listed
> above, I think we could easily provide the Mac users with a better
> installation experience.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> -- Sami

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