metadata query - help needed

[ropers at ropersonline.com (Jens Ropers)]

On 3 Mar 2004, at 20:58, Nicholas Riley wrote:
>
> I just happened to answer this question earlier today :)
>
> <http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/archive/macosx-admin/2004-March/ 
> 035810.html>

Uh... Cross posting? To be fair, I didn't read all the mails today, I  
prolly shouda. ;-)

> You need to use an installer that preserves resource forks in order to
> have the binding information still 'work'; I believe the Mac OS X
> installer uses some kludge to get around pax's lack of support for
> resource forks and Mac-specific file metadata.
>
> -- 
> =Nicholas Riley <njriley@xxxxxxxx> |  
> <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>

<em>
	Thanks a bunch for that Nicholas!
</em>

That does take me a lot further.

My understanding is that PackageMaker works like this:

- First, Apple clearly advise people to work on copies of their  
original files to build a package. The reason for this follows.
- If PackageMaker finds that any files in the "payload"  
(="Package_contents") directory have resource forks, it will MODIFY  
that directory it is working from.
- Package Maker will "split the resource forks" -- that is, it will  
take the resource forks and write them into separate files, then strip  
the original files off their resource forks.
- The result are files that do no longer have actual working resource  
forks, but do still contain all the (resource fork and data fork) data.
- PackageMaker then packages all files as usual, including the ones  
containing the resource fork data.
- The result is an installable package (and a modified "payload"  
directory which should be discarded and substituted with a new copy of  
the original payload directory, warts and resource forks and all).
- When the resulting package gets installed, Installer somehow  
recognizes the included "I am really a resource fork" files and  
reassembles them with the data files.
- The result should be correctly installed files, with resource forks.

Now, it more than baffles me that this didn't work in my case.

Nicholas (or others), can you confirm this to be a known problem with  
PackageMaker?
Are people aware of this?

More importantly, is Apple aware of this?
(I mean, hell, Apple are using PackageMaker for pretty much ALL their  
deployments. One would think that it's GOTTA work.)

Also, is there any other free installer software I could use?


Thanks again :)

Jens