Subject: Re: Windows Installer for Abiword using NSIS
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Aug 09 2001 - 13:23:39 CDT
Alan,
This is an interesting proposal, and I'm sorry none of the Win32 folks has
responded to you yet.
IIRC, Eric wrote the existing custom installer for us because InstallShield
and VISE were either too expensive or too annoying to use. A fair amount of
effort was put into making the current installer look nice, perform well,
and do the job we needed, but as you and others have been pointing out, that
code has been unmaintained for too long now, and it shows.
The idea of switching to a widely-used Open Source installer that's being
actively maintained is, of course, tremendously appealing in theory. As a
practical matter, I suspect that the main reason nobody's taken you up on
your idea yet is sheer lack of time to finish what you've started.
How confident are you that NSIS can do everything our current installer
does? What can it do that ours can't? For example, can it slurp up all
files matching a certain pattern in a directory? (I hate the recurring bug
that new translations get omitted from Windows releases because nobody
remembered to update the manifest file accordingly.)
bottom line
-----------
In short, the current installer works, but it doesn't Just Work. The last
time I checked, your NSIS-based installer does less than the current
installer, but it promises capabilities that ours doesn't have.
I doubt that anyone will agree to switch installers until the new one is at
least as functional as the current one. Since you're trying to recruit
someone else to do that work, it might help if you scope out in more detail
what the necessary work is.
For example, I haven't closely studied the feature set of either installer,
so I don't know what work it'll take to make a NSIS-based installer do
*everything* the ASK-based installer already does.
Would anyone be interested in writing this up as a POW?
Paul
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