Adobe CC 2015: Another Circle Around The Drain

Well, Adobe has updated the CC products to 2015 versions. That means another day spent dedicated to downloading and building packages via CCP.

In my previous blog post about Adobe CC, I covered how to mass-import them into Munki while still addressing the nasty uninstaller bug.

The Uninstaller Bug

As described in the previous post (linked above), the problem with device-based licensing for Adobe is that the uninstallers are very aggressive. Uninstalling a single device-based package will nuke the licensing for all other Adobe software that is licensed with that same serial number. In other words, if you install Photoshop CC and Dreamweaver CC, and uninstall Dreamweaver CC, Photoshop CC will complain that it is not licensed and needs to be fixed (and thus won’t run).

That’s irritating.

To address this, one solution is to use the Serial number installer package with the Named License uninstaller package. The Named License uninstaller will not nuke the entire license database on that machine. This allows us to successfully install and uninstall without affecting other Adobe products on the machine.

Note: There are other issues with this approach if you do not have unlimited licensing agreements (ETLA), please see the previous blog post for details.

The simplest way to handle this is to create two folders – “CC Packages” and “CC NoSerial Packages”. Use CCP to create Serial Number licensing packages in the “CC Packages” folder for all new CC 2015 products. Then create a Named license package for the same product in the “CC NoSerial Packages.”

IMPORTANT NOTE about Munki: The import script will use filenames as item names. You may wish to either create your CCP packages with “2015” as a suffix to differentiate it from the previous versions, or adjust the names in the pkginfo files manually, or adjust your manifests to include the appropriate new item names. Also, you may need to adjust icon names. You probably don’t want to reuse the same item name for CC 2015 products as CC 2014 products, otherwise Munki may try to install Adobe updates imported via aamporter on versions that are too high.

Importing The Packages Into Munki

Now that you have two copies of each product in separate folders, we can combine the right parts to allow easy importing into Munki.

Copy the Uninstaller packages from the “CC NoSerial Packages” folder for each product into the equivalent “CC Packages” product folder.

End result is that the “CC Packages” folder will now contain each of the separate CCP products, each of which will contain a “Build” folder with the Serial Number license installer, and a Named license uninstaller.

Now we can run Tim Sutton’s mass Adobe CC import script. Before executing, however, you may wish to open it up and change Line 42 to “2015”:

MUNKIIMPORT_OPTIONS = [
    "--subdirectory", "apps/Adobe/CC/2014",
    "--developer", "Adobe",
    "--category", "Creativity",
]

becomes

MUNKIIMPORT_OPTIONS = [
    "--subdirectory", "apps/Adobe/CC/2015",
    "--developer", "Adobe",
    "--category", "Creativity",
]

Now you can run the script on your “CC Packages” folder:
./munkiimport_cc_installers.py CC\ Packages

The script will create the appropriate install and uninstall DMGs, and pkginfos for all of these products. Don’t forget to run makecatalogs afterwards.

In my initial testing, none of the CC 2015 apps produced any errors or problems installing or uninstalling via Munki.

Leave a comment