Brigadier
A Windows- and OS X-compatible Python script that fetches, from Apple's or your software update server, the Boot Camp ESD ("Electronic Software Distribution") for a specific model of Mac. It unpacks the multiple layers of archives within the flat package and if the script is run on Windows with the --install option, it also runs the 64-bit MSI installer.
On Windows, the archives are unpacked using 7-Zip, and the 7-Zip MSI is downloaded and installed, and removed later if Brigadier installed it. This tool used to use dmg2img to perform the extraction of files from Apple's WindowsSupport.dmg file, but more recent versions of 7-Zip have included more completely support for DMGs, so dmg2img seems to be no longer needed.
This was written for two reasons:
We'd like to maintain as few Windows system images as possible, but there are typically 3-5 BootCampESD packages available from Apple at any given time, targeting specific sets of models. It's possible to use the Orca tool to edit the MSI's properties and disable the model check, but there are rarely cases where a single installer contains all drivers. Apple can already download the correct installer for a booted machine model in OS X using the Boot Camp Assistant, so there's no reason we can't do the same within Windows.
Sometimes we just want to download and extract a copy of the installer for a given model. The steps to do this manually are tedious, and there are many of them. As of the spring of 2013, Apple has made a number of Boot Camp installer packages available on their support downloads page, but they are still a split across many different different sets of models and it is still inconvenient to ensure you have the correct package.
It was originally designed to be run as post-imaging step for Boot Camp deployments to Macs, but as it requires network connectivity, a network driver must be already available on the system. (See Caveats below)
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