PKG archive file utility for Windows

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robbio - 03 Mar 2008 14:09 GMT

Hi at all,

do you know if there is an utility, runnning on Windows Platform, and
opening and extracting the PKG Apple's files?

thanks a lot
robbio

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Jolly Roger - 03 Mar 2008 14:19 GMT

> do you know if there is an utility, runnning on Windows Platform, and
> opening and extracting the PKG Apple's files?

Nope. Why would you want one?

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robbio - 03 Mar 2008 14:28 GMT

Because I downloaded some pkg files, an open source project, and I wanted to
extract them...just this.

thanks
robbio

>> do you know if there is an utility, runnning on Windows Platform, and
>> opening and extracting the PKG Apple's files?
>
> Nope. Why would you want one?

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Jolly Roger - 03 Mar 2008 15:06 GMT

> >> do you know if there is an utility, runnning on Windows Platform, and
> >> opening and extracting the PKG Apple's files?
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> Because I downloaded some pkg files, an open source project, and I wanted to
> extract them...just this.

Right. But why? What did you intend to do with them?

You realize if the package contains any files with resource forks, those
resources were lost when you unzipped the package on your Windows
machine, right? Such files will now be useless on a Mac.

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robbio - 03 Mar 2008 15:13 GMT

ok,
If I understand what you said then:
I think the pkg archive, an open source project, contains source files and I
want to see them (I'm a developer) so I thought the pkg archive file I
downloaded was another type of archive as the zip, rar and so on, and I
tried to search some utility to opene and extract it.

I don't know what you mean with "the package contains any files with
resource forks" but I'm interested only at the source files.

regards
robbio

>> >> do you know if there is an utility, runnning on Windows Platform, and
>> >> opening and extracting the PKG Apple's files?
[quoted text clipped - 10 lines]
> resources were lost when you unzipped the package on your Windows
> machine, right? Such files will now be useless on a Mac.

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Tom Stiller - 03 Mar 2008 15:54 GMT

> I think the pkg archive, an open source project, contains source files and I
> want to see them (I'm a developer) so I thought the pkg archive file I
> downloaded was another type of archive as the zip, rar and so on, and I
> tried to search some utility to opene and extract it.

If it's n open source project, aren't the source files available from
SourceForge or FreshMeat?

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Tom Stiller

PGP fingerprint = 5108 DDB2 9761 EDE5 E7E3 7BDA 71ED 6496 99C0 C7CF

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Tom Harrington - 03 Mar 2008 16:24 GMT

> If I understand what you said then:
> I think the pkg archive, an open source project, contains source files and I
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> I don't know what you mean with "the package contains any files with
> resource forks" but I'm interested only at the source files.

How recently were these installers created? Prior to Mac OS X 10.4,
pkg-style archives were actually bundles, meaning that they were a
directory tree that the user interface would represent as a single file.
If you looked into those bundles you'd find a file called (typically)
Archive.pax.gz, which contains the actual files. This is a compressed
pax archive, and pax is an open archive format available on other
platforms.

This format is still commonly in use even though current versions
Apple's developer tools use a newer, single-file format. I _think_ the
new one is actually an xar archive, but I haven't tried opening one up
by hand.

Tom Stiller's right, though-- it would be very unlikely for an open
source project to include source files in a pkg-style installer, just
because it's an awkward way to distribute those files. Open source
projects almost inevitably provide a tar.gz archive, or svn access, or
some other way of getting source code that's better suited to the task.

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Tom "Tom" Harrington
Independent Mac OS X developer since 2002
http://www.atomicbird.com/

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Jolly Roger - 03 Mar 2008 16:39 GMT

> If I understand what you said then:
> I think the pkg archive, an open source project, contains source files

Highly doubtful. There's little benefit to a software developer to go
through the trouble of building an entire installer package around
source code. Much easier and simpler just to zip up the source and
provide a zip archive for download. I'm betting you downloaded the wrong
file.

What open source project is this? maybe we can help you locate the
source.

> and I
> want to see them (I'm a developer) so I thought the pkg archive file I
> downloaded was another type of archive as the zip, rar and so on, and I
> tried to search some utility to opene and extract it.

Packages are installer archives. When you open them on Mac OS X, the
system installer launches and starts installation.

> I don't know what you mean with "the package contains any files with
> resource forks" but I'm interested only at the source files.

That's another topic, but basically: The default file system for Mac OS
X is HFS+. This file system supports files with multiple forks. Some
resources in some Mac OS X applications are stored in a separate fork
from the data fork in a given file. This separate fork is called the
"resource fork".

.
.
.

BTW, you've been doing something we call "top posting" which is
considered improper etiquette in Usenet news groups such as this one.
It's not the end of the world, but may be something you wish to correct
in the future. Thankfully, it's easily remedied, and no level-headed
person will hold it against you if you correct your posting style now!
As with most things, the decision is yours - do whatever you think is
best. This should illustrate the problem to you:

A: Because it reverses the flow of conversation.
Q: Why is top-posting frowned upon on Usenet?
A: Top-posting (aka TOFU - Top-post Over, Full quote Under)
Q: What is one of the most annoying things in news groups?

There are some great resources on the web for pretty much everything
you'd ever want to know about the subject. When you get a minute, you
might want to read these web pages:

Quoting Style:
<http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2000/06/14/quoting.html>

Quoting How To:
<http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanb/documents/quotingguide.html>

Posting Style:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style>

RFC 1855 - Netiquette Guidelines:
<http://www.dtcc.edu/cs/rfc1855.html>

The Netiquette Book:
<http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/>

How To Ask Questions the Smart Way:
<http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>

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robbio - 04 Mar 2008 15:05 GMT

After some time looking for what I have done, I realize, you are right,
what I downloaded is just the installer packages.
After, I found the sources of the projects.
Sorry for my misunderstanding and thank you.
The project I was looking for is Osirix, an open source prooject for MAC os,
about medical image managing.

regards
roberto

>> If I understand what you said then:
>> I think the pkg archive, an open source project, contains source files
[quoted text clipped - 63 lines]
> How To Ask Questions the Smart Way:
> <http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>

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Tom Stiller - 04 Mar 2008 15:41 GMT

> After some time looking for what I have done, I realize, you are right,
> what I downloaded is just the installer packages.
> After, I found the sources of the projects.
> Sorry for my misunderstanding and thank you.
> The project I was looking for is Osirix, an open source prooject for MAC os,
> about medical image managing.

Minor note for future reference, it's Mac, an abbreviation for
Macintosh, not MAC an acronym for Media Access Control.

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Tom Stiller

PGP fingerprint = 5108 DDB2 9761 EDE5 E7E3 7BDA 71ED 6496 99C0 C7CF

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Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / March 2008

PKG archive file utility for Windows