Installer defers to existing copies of apps

I think that this is a property of your new installer, not the "standard" one. The regular one has been happily installing over old installs for years. Just tested installing an old version over top of a new one on my system, and it works as expected. Unless I'm not understanding what the symptom is.

If I run the MWorks installer, drag MWServer.app from /Applications to my desktop, and then run the installer again, I see the following in /var/log/install.log:

Applications/MWServer.app relocated to Users/cstawarz/Desktop/MWServer.app
PackageKit: Registered bundle file://localhost/Users/cstawarz/Desktop/MWServer.app/

I just tried this with both my installer and yours and got the same result.

However, I was partly wrong in my initial report, as it turns out that the installer does in fact overwrite the contents of Desktop/MWServer.app with the new files. Maybe it's trying to respect the user's decision to move the app bundle to a non-standard location?

Here's the problem I see: If a user archives their current installation of MWorks, say by moving the apps and frameworks to ~/Documents/Old MWorks, before installing a new version, the installer will overwrite the backed-up apps with the new ones, thereby both destroying the backup and confusing the user by not installing the new apps in /Applications. Unfortunately, I'm no longer sure that changing CFBundleVersion will solve the problem.

Maybe we could just zip the archive?

Actually, what if you copy instead of move? I've seen OS X watch the filesystem node instead of the file path in other contexts. If you copy, it will create a new node, so it is possible at this could help.

Zipping the archive is probably the most robust solution. But I'll try copying, too, just to see what happens.

It looks like you can prevent this behavior by passing the option --no-relocate to PackageMaker. I've added this to new_installer/build_installer, and the generated installer now ignores the existing MWServer and installs the new one in /Applications. Nice!