Retrospect client installer receipt problem

[jelockwood]

The Retrospect Client for Mac installer does - at least when manually run correctly install the client and the client software itself i.e. the System PreferencePane does have its own correct version reported in its own plist at /Library/PreferencePanes/Retrospect Client.prefPane/Contents/Info.plist

 

Unfortunately though the actual installer pkg file itself keeps being issued with the same version 1.0 in the pkg. This causes it to generate a receipt file also marked as version 1.0. 

 

The reason this is a problem is that enterprise software deployment/patch management solutions typically use the receipt file version number to determine if the currently installed version is older or newer than an updated version, for example Munki. As a result Munki will think the currently installed version is 1.0 and the version of the 'new' client is also 1.0 and therefore nothing needs to be installed as an update.

 

I have reported this previously to Retrospect way back in March 2017 when version 14.0 was released and pointed out to them that version 14.0, 13.5 and 13.0 at least had this bug. They responded that this would be addressed in the next version which turned out to be 14.1 (it was not), I reminded them and was told again that it would be fixed in the next version i.e. 14.5 and sadly once again this issue has not been fixed.

 

This would be absolutely trivial to fix, all they need to do is set the version string of the installer pkg to match the version of the client so it becomes 14.5.0.146 instead of 1.0.

 

Sadly this is not by any means the first time Retrospect have repeatedly failed to address a bug - even if I will agree it is not in this case a critical bug. However since it is so simple to fix it is very disappointing it has repeatedly not been.

 

Note: I have only myself encountered this with Munki but Munki is very widely used and I suspect other similar enterprise tools like JAMF or FileWave might also be affected as they also tend to look at package receipts.

 

For what its worth my now long outstanding ticket for this issue is number #53902 they have so far failed to respond to my latest update.