In comments on my previous post here, TGB makes some interesting points:
While you’re not wrong that Flash Player deployment isn’t ideal, and it should be as easy as dragging and dropping a pkg, I don’t see how the repackaging route is any more of a waste of time than any other product. Adium, Mactracker, Firefox, Chrome and a whole bucket of other apps all require packaging to be deployed. Sure, they might auto-update, but you have to get an initial version out there, not to mention getting your preferred default settings out too.
Most, if not all the items mentioned (Adium, Mactracker, Firefox, and Chrome) are distributed as “drag-n-drop” disk images where the user is expected to drag the application to the /Applications folder. I’d argue that is an industry standard deployment method. The software deployment system I use (Munki) can install items like this without the need to package them. If your software deployment mechanism does not, perhaps you should be requesting that feature from your vendor, since this is a very common distribution format, and code-wise, requires little effort to support. When a new version of Firefox or Chrome comes out, I just download the disk image and directly import it into Munki — no packaging needed.
Adobe Flayer Player cannot be distributed as a drag-n-drop application disk image — it’s not an application. So the “correct” distribution format for this software is the Apple package format.
Preferred default settings is a completely different issue. As long as vendors use Apple’s preference file format, this is solved with MCX or Lion/Mountain Lion profiles.
TGB also writes:
Not to mention, with any of these products, testing them (yes?) is more time and effort-intensive than any actual packaging. 3/4 of deployment and integration is non-technical work. A couple of minutes difference doesn’t really matter in the scheme of QA, UAT and change management process (or are others just not doing that?).
Flash is not needed by any business-critical application where I work, yet our users demand (or at least expect) it and Apple and Mozilla demand it stay up-to-date, or they will disable the plug-in. So for us at least, testing is quite minimal for Flash. If it installs and can display some Flash content, it’s good.
But yes, I do understand and sympathize with admins that must test each release of Flash with business-critical applications — and Adobe’s distribution format is not the key issue here; frequency of releases is. I’d argue that this is an impetus to reduce or eliminate your internal dependency on Flash.
Where I disagree with TGB: Adobe’s non-standard distribution adds more than a “couple of minutes” to preparing a new release of Flash for enterprise distribution. If we could be sure that Adobe will never change anything about their installer and updater, we could just figure out a process and repeat it for each new release. But Adobe can and has changed things, so for each release we must also test that our packaging/repackaging/custom deployment steps actually end up with the desired results. This is usually not a huge deal, but also cannot be ignored. But more importantly, theirs is a one-off solution. If we have to keep track of and test different deployment solutions for each vendor and product, we end up wasting a lot of time and effort, and making a lot of mistakes. Where would it end? Unique software deployment methods for each vendor? (Oh that there was only ONE unique deployment method for Adobe software!)
No, a line must be drawn. Here. No farther.
Managing OS X 