OS X treats some folders as files. These are generally applications and the older style of installer package, although frameworks have the same property. This is a great benefit from a user perspective as all the resources for a particular application can be in one place, which looks transparently like a single file.

Of course, Windows and Linux -- the two platforms on which ZEN Primary servers are supported -- do not have file systems that deal well with this property, and simply show OS X bundles as folders. The magic here is generally the OS X "bundle bit", which can be seen and tested with several OS X utilities including "SetFile" and "getFileInfo -aB".

A programmatic understanding of OS X bundles is essential for ZENWorks to use some OS X installer packages (although there is a newer flat-file package format that uses compression) and to select and identify applications.

My specific request here is:
1) That the Zenworks data store be extended to understand when a folder of files is an OS X bundle (maybe by extending ZEN bundle XML properties)
2) That the web plugins for ZENWorks on the Mac be able to select OS X bundles as files for upload or other manipulation
3) That the ZEN agent on OS X be able to translate file sets as OS X bundles before delivering them. This would be helpful not only for application delivery and package installation, but is also probably a pre-requisite for Automator-based OS X image creation in a future product release.

by: Johnnie O. | over a year ago | Application Mgmt