[MacTUG] Roll you own "autopkg"

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

I have stopped using autopkg and have a script that does what I was using AutoPKG to do, but more to my liking. Please note, this is not the start of an “Autopkg suxs” thread so if you are a happy user of Autopkg, that is great and no need to defend it (and I shan’t respond) 😉

Here are some issues I was looking at.

  1.  I don’t really like using other people’s recipes to download and package stuff. Security issues etc. Auto PKG is a bit of a black box. At least with my (arguably clunky) scripts, I know what is going on
  2.  Some stuff I wanted to download was not available in the common (or popular) Autopkg repositories (and I did not like using a lot of repositories)
  3.  I wanted the to download native apps o PKG files and I wanted them also wrapped in the “.CMMAC” format that SCCM uses
  4.  I wanted the option of customizing the apps. For example adding a policies.json file (for homepage) to Firefox.app/contents/Resources/distribution
  5.  I wanted to have control over my curating of the versions (currently I want only the newest copy but wanted control over that for future use)
  6.  I wanted Mattermost to be notified of updates and sent weekly reminders that this service is running

So I wrote a (somewhat inelegant) script that does this for Firefox, Chrome and Office. If anyone wants to see it I can email them. It is still a bit of a work in progress but it seems to be working fine.


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Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environment
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
https://uwaterloo.ca/environment-computing/about/people
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