this is not a religious question and I’m not asking about which would be
more convenient or elegant. Which compression should I use for
distributing Max externals on the web? SIT or ZIP????

In order to be able to tell between Mac and Win I always used SIT on
Mac. After Max 4.6 was released I got complains by people saying that
folders were empty, so I downloaded my own SIT files, resompressed the
content as ZIP and everybody was happy. This is already strange.
Now poeple start to complain that in the ZIP archives Mach-O Externals
(Max 4.5) are displayed as folders and not as bundles. So what’s going
on here? Since OS X natively extracts ZIP I’d guess that ZIP is the
format to go? Is there something wrong with the current version of
StuffIt Expander (because with my rather old version everything is fine)?
And why do people get folders instead of bundles with ZIP?

BTW, I recently had a similar problem with a Max standalone compressed
as SIT. It wasn’t working in a friend’s machine. Then I sent him a ZIP
and everything was fine. But on the friend’s machine (G4, 10.4.7) it was
also not possible to install the Max 4.5 Runtime freshly downloaded from
the C74 website. When double-clicking the installer nothing happened (->
same as with the application I sent him as SIT).

Olaf

For mac, a compressed disk-image is probably most universal, and is the Apple-recommended format. Use disk utility, create and fill your disk image, then use the “convert” menu command to compress it. It’s also possible to embed a license agreement, with multiple language translations if desired – search Apple’s developer documentation on their website.

Finder-zipped archives are problematic for users with Stuffit installed. Stuffit will take over ownership of zip files and may not decompress correctly. The OS X component “BOMArchiveHelper” must be used to decompress. These zips may not decompress correctly on Windows either (resource forks, etc).

I’ve had reasonable success with gzipped files – these have the advantage that they can be created on the fly from an uncompressed source (like an uncompressed .dmg) using php on the webserver…

StuffIt is, sadly, no longer a robust choice.

> Now poeple start to complain that in the ZIP archives Mach-O Externals
> (Max 4.5) are displayed as folders and not as bundles. So what’s going
> on here?

Finder (HFS/HFS+/AFP) meta-data is not included in the archive, or
the unpacker software is not recognizing the meta-data. Bundles and
Packages are nothing more than folder hierarchies with a bit set (or
maybe it’s something in the .DSStore, or both).

> Since OS X natively extracts ZIP I’d guess that ZIP is the
> format to go?

OS X’s Zip is a little idiosyncratic in that it does special handling
of resource forks (yes, Virginia, there is still such a thing as a
resource fork), Finder attributes, and other groovy Mac OS stuff. The
result is unpacked admirably by Finder’s built in Zip, but not so
admirably by other Zip implementations (you get tons of ._XXX files
on Windows that will confuse your Windows users no end).

> Is there something wrong with the current version of
> StuffIt Expander (because with my rather old version everything is
> fine)?

There’s plenty wrong with StuffIt nowadays. It was obviously going
downhill when they removed support for resolving aliases in DropStuff.

BTW: I build .ZIP archives for Windows users using gzip in the
Terminal (called from an AppleScript that runs the whole packaging
process). For the disk images I also have an AppleScript that calls
the relevant CLI tools.

————– http://www.bek.no/~pcastine/Litter/ ————-
Peter Castine +–> Litter Power & Litter Bundle for Jitter
Universal Binaries on the way
iCE: Sequencing, Recording &
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I ran into the same problem recently. No matter what I try (zip, stuffit, usbstick, network) my externals are displayed as folders when I move them from one computer to another. Max no longer recognizes them. Something changed recently because the last time I did this (a month ago or so), there was no problem.

I don’t have much experience with mac/unix filesystems so if anyone could give me a clue on how to fix this, that would be more than welcome.

Thanks in advance,
Mattijs