How to raise verbosity of Installer.app?
Solution 1:
You can use the command line installer (in /usr/sbin/installer).
From the man page:
The installer command is used to install Mac OS X installer packages to a specified domain or volume.
and use the -verbose or -verboseR options.
By example :
installer -verbose -pkg DeveloperTools.mpkg -target /
Solution 2:
If it's on macOS 10.12 you can use the new log stream command together with --predicate flag to narrow down the issues. Please note that log gives you a lot more output then syslog does/can.
log stream --predicate examples:
--predicate 'eventMessage contains "my message"'
--predicate 'eventType == logEvent and messageType == info'
--predicate 'processImagePath endswith "d"'
--predicate 'not processImagePath contains[c] "some spammer"'
--predicate 'processID < 100'
--predicate 'senderImagePath beginswith "my sender"'
--predicate 'eventType == logEvent and subsystem contains "com.example.my_subsystem"'
You can also add --level=debug to get the maximum verbosity from log, and then narrow down the Installer.app issues with --predicate