[macbain80]

Anytime I download anything, especially shareware, it's always a compressed file. You open it, it turns into a .dmg. You open THAT, it turns into a disc. Then you copy the file from the disk to your desktop. Then you trash the .zip and .dmg. Then you unmount the .dmg's drive.

Why? It seems like twenty-two steps to just download an already tiny 2 MB file. Heck, I just went through this whole process for DeLocalizer, a 451k file! It took four times as long to "decompress" it as it took to download!

Why don't people just post ordinary g-dam files? Am I missing something?

[budster101]

I often see dmg files for download, but I understand your being upset with that situation and how often this really does occur. I do remember when downloading exe files a long long time ago, they often had to be zipped to protect the packets from becoming corrupt in the download process. I'm not so sure dmg or binary files have the same potential problem as they are contained better.

jpg, gif, and other files should be compressed again for downloading purposes to protect them.

[wataru]

I agree, partly. Anyone who zips a dmg file didn't make the dmg properly in the first place--just use the internal zip compression offered by the dmg format.

Posting "ordinary g-dam files" isn't possible because an app usually is not a file, it's a collection of files bundled together, and often there are resource forks and metadata that gets mangled when transferred over protocols that don't understand them. That's why you need to shove everything into a single binary file. But the zipped dmg thing is annoying. So is .tar.gz -- Tiger's decompressor first un-gzips it, and then un-tars the tar file. If people would just name the file .tgz you could get to the decompressed final result in one step and without producing extraneous files.

[Diggory Laycock]

The most likely reason is pragmatic - .DMG is not really known outside Mac users - so most webservers are not set up to send you the file properly - this gives the user the DMG data not as a downloaded file, but as a page of text. Most people don't administer their own servers - so can't get the MIME type for DMG added to the server's config. The easiest way to get round it is to compress the dmg with zip - every webserver knows how to handle zip files.

It's annoying, but a pragmatic solution for many people.

[disco_stu]

I can testify to Diggory's post. When I first hosted my app (as a dmg), I noticed in the logs that people weren't downloading 100% of the file. I zipped up the dmg and haven't had a problem since.

[lavar78]

Originally Posted by macbain80

Anytime I download anything, especially shareware, it's always a compressed file. You open it, it turns into a .dmg. You open THAT, it turns into a disc. Then you copy the file from the disk to your desktop. Then you trash the .zip and .dmg. Then you unmount the .dmg's drive.

Isn't the .zip file deleted automatically?

[Mithras]

Though all it takes is a one-line .htaccess file to fix the MIME type issues.

[OptimusG4]

Originally Posted by lavar78

Isn't the .zip file deleted automatically?

Only if you have 'Open "safe" files after downloading' turned on in Safari.

[mitchell_pgh]

While I like the ability to use zip, I enjoyed knowing that sea, dmg, sit, etc. files were Mac files.

I'm old school.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by Mithras

Though all it takes is a one-line .htaccess file to fix the MIME type issues.

Yeah, if you have the possibility of of adding .htaccess files. I, for instance, don't.