(Guest post by Allister Banks)
Working with modern tools in the ‘auto'(dmg/pkg) suite, it sure reinforces the old chestnut, ‘it’s turtles XML all the way down.’ The thing that struck me when first diving into using autopkg was that different product recipes could potentially have a good amount of similarities when they share common processors. One example is drag-drop apps that can be discovered with an ‘appcast’ URL, which, in my recollection, became common as the Sparkle framework gained popularity.
This commonality is exactly the type of thing sysadmins like myself seek to automate, so I built a few helper scripts to 1. discover what apps have appcast URLs, 2. generate the base download recipe, and further, the 3. pkg-building recipe that can use the download recipe as a ‘parent’, and the 4. munki or JSS recipes which can nest the pkg recipe in it. Recursivity is the new black.
Please do take a look if you feel you’ve got apps that folks haven’t built recipes for yet, and laugh at/use/fork my code as you see fit!