[Sparkle] Sparkle Integration Questions - Customized Applications

[Dean Shavit]

on 1/27/08 3:47 PM, David Dunham at dunham at mac.com spake:

> On 27 Jan 2008, at 10:25, Dean Shavit wrote:
> 
>> 2) Sparkle replaces the entire app directory, not just the
>> differences between the update and the existing app - which won't
>> work for our users, and there's customized graphics inside the
>> application and a custom plist
> 
> I guess it's working for you, but this sounds like a bad idea in
> general. Normally you can't assume that your application (or its
> users) have permission to write to the .app directory. It may be
> installed in a place they don't have permissions for, or still be on a
> read-only disk image.

David,

It's not a bad idea, it works flawlessly, and has for two years (the amount
of time the application has been available). We've considered moving to a
web view, but that has it's own issues, and the app would need to be
personalized at some level anyway. We've built a system based on Mac OS X
Server to handle subscriptions / personalization /updates on our server,
it's just that we don't have a way to update copies already deployed, and
this is a request from our users I'm trying to fulfill.

As for permissions, Sparkle relies on the same permissions as the
personalization does. If you launch our app as a standard user, and it
triggers Sparkle, and the app is in a location (like /Applications) that
requires admin rights, you're prompted to authenticate.


It's no different form the privs we'd need to anything on the inside of the
app...

What I'd really like is that the appcast simply *not* include the
personalization files, replace the files on the local machine with what's on
the server, leaving the personalization files in place. However, it seems
that Sparkle replaces out the whole directory by design.

I understand our app isn't like most others - but its design fits the task
at hand, and therefore we must "find a way to make it work"