port (pkg|dmg)

[Anders F Björklund]

Jeff Johnson wrote:

>> You could look at the .bom file inside of each .pkg (with lsbom),  
>> to know which files that were installed by it.
>>
>
> Is there any description of the *.bom format that exists on the  
> planet?
>
> I've looked (and failed) for years ...
>
> Yes I know lsbom(8) and have read the man page ... that's not what  
> I'm asking.

The bom(5) format is proprietary, and not available elsewhere.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/ 
Reference/ManPages/man5/bom.5.html says:
      "The bill of materials file appeared in NeXTSTEP to support  
installation.  The file format was updated
      and extended for Mac OS X 10.0.  The format was extended to  
support 64 bit file sizes with OS X 10.3."

There are some other formats that provide the same information.

For instance XAR, which have most of the same info in the TOC ?
The .xpkg package format used that, intended for use with pkg(1).
Of course, that tool and the GUI for it remains to be written... ;-)

--anders


PS. xpkg 0.2 proof-of-concept was included with MacPorts 1.8.0,
     adding "xpkg" to the portarchivetype list will create them...
     It is just a simplistic XML/XAR extension of the .tgz format,
     and will need to grow support for package signatures (xarsig).