This document provides you with general information regarding the Packages application.

Packages is a solution for developers, Mac OS X administrators and anyone who needs to create installers for Mac OS X.

It is assumed that:

• You know how to use Mac OS X.

• You have some knowledge about what an installer does.

• You have used at least once the Installer application to install an application or an OS update.

If you have been or are still using Iceberg, you should be able to find some similarities in the way Packages works.

The following formatting conventions are used in this documentation:

• File system objects such as the name of other applications or system paths are displayed with a fixed font.

  Example:

  /Applications/Dictionary.app

• Special keyboard keys are displayed in bold.

  Example:

  Validate with Return.

• Command line instructions examples are displayed in white boxes with a dark gray frame and with a fixed font. The $ character is used to display the Terminal prompt; it is not part of the instructions.

  Example:

  $ /usr/local/bin/packagesbuild -F /absolute/path /path/to/the/project.pkgproj.pkgproj

• Tips, pedantic pieces of information, special cases are displayed in light gray boxes with a gray frame.

  Example:

  Note: This is a note.

• All the screenshots in this guide are in black & white.

As you may have noticed in the Welcome to Packages chapter, the documents of packages are architectures around tab views and eventually a source list.

To navigate in the different sections of a document, you just need to click the tabs or select a row in the source list.

When you select a row in the source list, the visible tab will be the either the default visible tab or the one that was previously visible when the row was unselected.

By default, when you create a new document or open a document, the visible tab will always be the leftmost one. If you want to change the default visible tab:

A Packages project makes use of a lot of references to file system objects (files, folders, symbolic links, etc.).

These references can be for the file system objects used to build the payload of a package, for the documents used to customize the user interface of a distribution, for the location of the build folder, etc.

Almost every reference can have 3 possible styles:

Style		Description
	Relative to Project	The reference is a relative path to the project folder.
	Absolute Path	The reference is an absolute path.
	Relative to Reference Folder	The reference is a relative path to a custom reference folder defined by the project.

If you want to change a reference style:

If you want to change the default reference style for new references: