it seems that document talks mostly about downloading and dependency management. installing things in the correct places. Presenting a consistent UI , setting the correct registry settings, dealing with user install directories are all messy things. Either you can use the pascal script or use a C++ dll, and call it from inno setup. either way you are saving yourself a lot of code.

mark


On 1/9/07, Ralf Habacker <ralf.habacker@freenet.de> wrote:
Peter Kümmel schrieb:
> mark cox wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure why you are re-inventing the wheel. inno setup is mature
>> installation software with many features and you can extend it to add those
>> missing features. In my experience, installers on windows always turn
>> out to
>> be much more complicated than anticipated and because inno setup is mature
>> it has already encountered and solved those problems.
>> website: www.innosetup.com
>>
>> mark
>>
>>
>> On 1/8/07, Ralf Habacker <ralf.habacker@freenet.de > wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> there is an updated spec of the installer available on
>>>
>>> http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdesupport/kdewin32/installer/doc/readme.txt?rev=620682&view=auto
>>>
>>> .
>>>
>>>
>>> Any suggestions too or sombody want's to help coding  beside Christian
>>> Ehrlicher, who had contributed already some patches ?
>>>
>>> Ralf
>>>
>>>
>
> I use inno setup here:
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=29557&package_id=57553&release_id=425927
> (the .exe). It has a pascal like syntax, and when
> you wanna distribute all files within a directory and wanna call
> some .bat files it is very convenient.
> It has a build-in 7zip compression.
>
>
> Wouldn't it be the simplest to just ship all files in one package.
> When someone doesn't want some specific libraries he should
> do it like a expert and use svn checkouts.
>
>
Do you have read
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/kdesupport/kdewin32/installer/doc/readme.txt
or verified kdelibs/share/apps/cmake/modules how much dependencies there
are. The latter shows currently 47 find... entries, not included the
additional tools  Do you like to build all such packages by hand to be
able to compile KDE applications. Additional only downloading all these
files by hand require much time.

The kde-installer supports you in the manner: 'okay, let's see which
packages are required and where can I download it with one click'

Your refered setup.exe size is 134 KB, a zipped kdelibs with debug
informations is about 138 MB, unpackaged 616 MB. Do you like to
recompile your installer exe every time a little patch is required ?
Sure, you can create additional installers which contains updates, but
this ends up like the windows update service, where you have many
installed patches in your software panel.

Then the next full update is out and you have to deinstall all patches
by hand, which will create many confusions. I have used inno setup for
KDE on cygwin and switched later to the cygwin installer in the long run
because of problems with such updates.

In the opposite using an online installer like the kde-installer is,
you can create a new patch directory on the kde mirrors, upload some
zipped files, add little dependency informations to the installer main
config files located on this mirror and users are able to use this
patches immediatly. This belongs also to snapshots.

Inno Setup uses pascal and it might be not easy for non pascal users to
learn all the required stuff. It is not very easy if you like to make
more complicated things. Isn't it be more natural to use qt for a kde
installer.

In the long run there will be required to have standalone package like
Jaroslav had done for kexi, but who will maintain this in this state of
the project. Are we all not happy to use available resources as much as
possible ?

In my opinion the strategy is 'let's look where a binary packages for a
required library or tool is and use it as available resource before
recompiling it by myself.

There may be packages, which are unusable for kde like the missing
symbol problem with libxml2 on the gnuwin32 site for which Christian had
compiled a replacement in his win32libs distribution.

How do you be able to handle this with inno setup ?  The kde-installer
could assist you in this area too by adding a rule in the main server
based config file to exclude the libxml library from gnuwin32 site.
Instead it would use the related packages from the win32libs website.

Ralf












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