No it is not necessary to create an installer for the plugin, unless it does not have a dependecny on something that needs to be copied onto the deployment machine. What kind of error are you getting?

It might be because you may be using a third party framework which you are not copying onto the new machine.

Manan Joshi

- Efficient InDesign Solutions -

MetaDesign Solutions

http://metadesignsolutions.com/services/indesign-development.php

Does the plugin have a dependency on any third party framework, does this release plugin load on your development machine?

Manan Joshi

Try loading the release plugin of any sample plugin that ships with Indesign SDK on the deployment machine. If that loads on that machine, then either there is a problem in the project setting of your project or there is some dependency for the plugin to load that you are missing.

Last thing you could do is install Xcode on the machine and try to debug the problem.

Manan Joshi

- Efficient InDesign Solutions -

MetaDesign Solutions

http://metadesignsolutions.com/services/indesign-development.php

Make sure you are using the correct version of Indesign to load your plugin, for ex: CS5 plugins are not compatible with CS5.5 and vice versa.

Secondly you can debug plugin's using release version of Indesign too, you just need to create the debugging symbols for it. There are restricted debugging support on the release build, in this case you just need to look into the gdb console for any messages.

Manan Joshi

- Efficient InDesign Solutions -

MetaDesign Solutions

http://metadesignsolutions.com/services/indesign-development.php

Show/inspect package contents on both destination and source plugin. Probably the internal links are broken.

If so, forget about SMB shares, SFTP or what else you used. ZIP the plugin using Finder's "Create Archive" ...

Dirk

The build / output location is irrelevant. I build straight into a subfolder of the plug-ins folder.

Btw, this is just a matter of taste but I would not dump my sources into the SDK folder - it is no fun if you have to support multiple versions of InDesign.

File system links are broken during transport - having a look at the package of the source plugin that works on the development machine should be the proof.

If you are not scared by a command line, you can also use terminal:

ls -l /drag/your/plugin/into/terminal/window/to/produce/its/path...

If you need to transfer a whole folder, use ZIP on that.

I forgot to mention an alternative, the Disk Utility can be used to create DMG files from folders.

XCode also includes a tool "PackageMaker" that creates whole installer packages.

Dirk