20051014: Installing IDV on a Mac

>From: Dave Dempsey <address@hidden>
>Organization: SF State
>Keywords: 200510141944.j9EJim7s019640 IDV Mac installer

Hi Dave-

>I'd like to report what appears to be a bug in the IDV installer for Mac,
>at least on our machines (Mac G4 laptops and iMacs, Mac G5 iMacs and
>desktops, some running Panther and some running Tiger--basically it
>doesn't matter).
>
>Unzipping the installer file produces the desired directory structure on
>the Desktop:
>
>   installer.app/Contents/MacOS/installer
>
>However, the "installer" file lacks execute permission by anyone. As a
>result, double-clicking on the Desktop installer icon does nothing.
>
>Granting execute permission to the owner of
>installer.app/Contents/MacOS/installer solves the problem, but it seems
>unlikely that casual users of IDV would necessarily figure this out.

Hmmm, the settings for building the installer are set to have execute
permissions. I've not heard of others having this problem before but
maybe they just changed the permissions without letting us know of
the problem).

>On another note--forgive me if this is already covered somewhere in the
>documentation (I haven't done an exhaustive search)--I see that by default
>the IDV_1.2 folder is installed in /Applications (not the home directory
>of the account doing the installing). Accepting the default, if the user
>wants to run runIDV from the command line to start the software, they
>would have to cd to /Applications/IDV_1.2, which is probably not ideal
>(especially in a classroom computer lab situation).
>
>I got around this by putting /Applications/IDV_1.2 in the search path of
>each account in our computer lab so that students can run the IDV from the
>hope directory. However, then the
>
>     java -Xmx512m -jar idv.jar $*
>
>command run by runIDV can't find the idv.jar file. Hence, I've modified
>this line in runIDV to read
>
>     java -Xmx512m -jar /Applications/IDV/idv.jar $*
>
>Again, it seems unlikely that at least some casual users are going to
>figure out how to make adaptations like these. This second point is
>perhaps just my problem and nothing that you need to worry about, but I
>thought I'd relate our experience to give you a sense of how those of us
>in the field are implementing the IDV. (And I should emphasize that I'm
>grateful for your fine work!)

We need to get the Mac Installer stuff more robust.  Unfortunately,
we are using the free version of InstallAnywhere which doesn't provide
us with many options.   We'll try to get this figured out for the
next release.  

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Don
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