Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Application Installers - Part Deux

There should now be automated installers for both Windows and Mac posted.  They should both work well, but let me know if you have any issues.  Due to platform differences the two installers do quite different things.

Windows

Since Windows does not have a "bundle" in the Mac sense I am just locating everything inside one simple directory.  The installer should create \Wildcat wherever the app is installer (into Programs Files by default).  Inside \Wildcat there should be six file and one sub-folder.  The files are the primary executable (Wildcat.exe) and the five dependency libraries.  The sub-folder should be named Resources.  It contains all of the .tiff image, configuration XML files, and OpenGL shaders (.vsh, .gsh, .fsh).  With this, you should be good to go.

Mac OS X

On Mac there is a "bundle" concept.  All of the *.app objects in the /Applications directory are not single object, they are actually folders.  Inside these folders are most of the necessary files for the applications.  On Mac the only external dependency library Wildcat requires is xerces.  On Mac the xerces dylib has to be installed into /usr/local/lib.  In addition, Mac is much more specific about the permissions on all of the files.

With all of this in mind the Mac installer should copy Wildcat.app to the selected location (/Applications by default).  It will also copy xerces-c.28.0.dylib into /usr/local/lib and create two symbolic links (xerces-c.dylib and xerces-c.28.dylib) in the same directory.  These both point to the actual library.

Down the road I really need to improve the Mac installer to conditionally install xerces only if it does not already exist.  Have a try with either the Windows or the Mac version.  I welcome feedback.

Cheers,
   Graham

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