Package installer: Did you know about the nifty log window?

April 20, 2008 @ 11:36

There’s a few standards you should follow if you’re a developer and creating installers for OS X; if a product consists of several parts (e.g. a framework and an executable), you’re most likely going for what’s called a managed installer.

For the end user, a managed installer is one those *.pkg files that you double click, and then an installer shows up. The installer will guide you through a series of questions, possibly letting you decide where to put the stuff that the installer wants to install.

Unfortunately, some developers makes an ugly habit of making it hard to uninstall their products - by making the installer capable of only installing and not also uninstalling; this has no benefit at all - it will only make us, your customers, more irritated (since occasionally, we’ll want to uninstall stuff that doesn’t work as intended/promised). This is where Apple comes to our rescue!

For each managed installer, the installer application can display a log window with details on what’s happening during the install. This means that you can see what the installer does to your system, and hence, you can mimic an uninstaller by performing the reverse operations of the installer. But be careful; I really don’t recommend doing such stuff manually, but sometimes that’s the only way to solve the problem at hand.

To bring up the installer log window, look under the Window menu item, and behold the Installer Log item. Bring it up and you’ll soon have a detailed explanation of what happens during an install.

Happy (un)installing!

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