[Ham-Mac] OS X development

Sun, 17 Feb 2002 10:32:03 +0000

Sorry if this is getting a little off radio topics, but it does have some
bearing on how our Ham-Mac software is distributed via the Internet.

on 17/2/02 12:22 am, Chris Smolinski at [email protected] wrote:

> I've never made a dmg.gz file, how do you do it?

Like most things there is a hard way and an easy way. I only found the easy
way after I tried the hard way first.

The easy way is to download a copy of the freeware dmgtool (you will find a
link to it on www.versiontracker.com

The harder way is to use a combination of Apple's Disk Copy to make a new
image and save it and then gzip it with Stuffit Lite's DropTar.

One other point that caught me out:

I used dmgtool to produce a file.dmg.gz and renamed it to file.gz , however
that was a bad move because when I downloaded I found that stuffit ungzipped
it to just file instead of file.dmg and OS X didn't know that it was a .dmg.
I guess OSX needs the extension to work out the filetype.

So its best to use the full file.dmg.gz

I must admit its really confusing knowing what format to use for the
Macintosh now. 

In the PC world binary .zip archive files seem to be used universally.

In the Macintosh world we end up with .sit binary archives or the larger
.hqx text versions for pre OS X system.

It appears that .dmg Disk Images are what Apple recommends for application
distribution.

What I am not sure about is what what we are supposed to do after that,
should they be .gz .bz .uu .sit .hqx or what?

I am sure someone on this list will put me right.

Many thanks.

73
-- 
David Anderson, GM4JJJ         E-mail: [email protected]
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