Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:09:57 -0400 From: Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca
Does anyone have experience creating installers for Windows and MacOS X? What are the best free installers?
On OS X, Apple's standard installation mechanism is the .pkg format. However, personally, I think these are counterproductive. They are essentially a mechanism for arbitrary shell scripts to be run as root to install complex software, without recording much information about what effects the scripts had, so there is no standard way to uninstall packages. See `man packagemaker' for more details on building them if you'd like to. Some companies also use their own in-house installer mechanisms that tend to be overcomplicated and not especially useful.
I prefer using MacPorts http://www.macports.org/ for this sort of thing, and in fact there already is a port in MacPorts for Gambit 4.0b22. It's straightforward to turn this into a .pkg, too, with MacPorts, if you so desire: `port pkg gambit-c'. There are other similar package managers, like Fink and Nix, but my experience with MacPorts has been much better.