Well, since you can't be sure what a package will do, the user/admin should at least have the possibility to examine the contents of a package, manually or with virus-scanners or whatever without actually running any script or some unpack-in-place routine provided by the package itself. So far, some Installers fail this miserably: NullSoft Installer http://nsis.sourceforge.net/ The packager has complete control over any switches given to the package, and most choose not to provide an "unpack only" switch. There is no official way to unpack these packages, 7zip and the likes fail. Loki Installer http://www.lokigames.com/development/setup.php3 It seems you can give the parameter --noexec, which will probably not execute any scripts. Changing this in the prepended script would probably lead to a wrong md5-sum; but a specially prepared loki-setup would produce packets which could ignore that. So chances are slim somebody could change an already existing package, but the packager himself can do as he sees fit. And then, unpacking such a package by hand is not very feasible. For some others are third-party tools available, like http://innounp.sourceforge.net/ which you can use to examine packages by hand or plug in into your antivirus. I consider it mandatory that packages allow being unpacked in place, by a tool that is not part of the package itself. Its the least thing you can do. Regards Peter -- Operator in charge of Security Tel +41 1 287 2993 Cyberlink Internet Services AG Fax +41 1 287 2991 Richard Wagnerstrasse 6 admin@xxxxxxxxxxxx CH-8002 Zuerich http://www.cyberlink.ch
