Hey there Steve, thanks for your email, some comments inline
On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 8:03 PM Steven Githens <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Arch, > > I’m in the process of building installers for the Capture Tool (part of > the gpii-app code repo), and wanted to run an overview of issues with our > current windows installers (based on WiX [1]). Everything runs pretty slow > in my 2gig RAM Windows virtual machine, so it wasn’t until the last in > person meeting we had, that I realized we were having larger than minor > issues with it. > > In a Nutshell it sounds like the problems are: > 1) It often hangs on uninstall > 2) It takes a long time to run in both directions (install and uninstall) > 3) The size of the installer is large, and the resulting install > directories are quite large (about a gig and a half?) > > Am I missing anything? Our installer isn’t anymore complicated than a > standard windows “Click Next 4 times” Installer, so I imagine if the above > were resolved the installer itself would become a non-issue? > > I know stegru has already fixed several issues with 1 (though they may not > be in a public build yet). > Looking forward to get to them. > As far as 2 and 3, I think some of them are due to us being on a very old > version of Electron [2] > Electron has nothing to do with the installer slowness. The biggest problem is that we have a lot of files under our node_modules folder. Maybe we need to re-think the way we put things into the computer when installing. Maybe, implementing a 2-step installation as lots of software providers do these days would help. This is, installing the minimal set of things and then download all the meat from the internet (this is, all the relevant things in program files (x86)\morphic) as a zip file, unzipping it, etc. Regarding WiX, yes, it's ugly, very, but nowadays it's the best thing we can use in order for our installer to support things such as including merge modules (filebeat, sharex and documorph) or performing custom tasks during installation (i.e.: deal with the service) It's also true that we can do some cleanup in gpii-wix-installer since there are features that we don't use anymore, but these don't affect the size and/or slowness when installing/uinstalling. As always, it's a matter of time and resources, you know that we're such a small team working on many different things at a time and we all would love to see this working better. > and perhaps needing to dedupe some of the node_modules that are being > included multiple times. > Yes, that's one thing and we also need to ensure that we only ship production packages - we don't need anything related to testing. This is what I sometimes mentioned during our arch meetings, "we need to put our installer on a diet" In fact, yesterday I had a call with Kasper and he asked me what I would like to see happening first and I replied "the installer needs a lot of love", we both agreed that it is a top priority now that we want people to start taking Morphic home. In addition to that, a few months ago I started creating some code to take the installer creation logic out of gpii-app and have it in a custom repo ( https://github.com/GPII/gpii-windows-installer/pull/1/files) that we can later on configure somehow to produce installers as new code gets into gpii-app/master (that would make QA's life easier). That'd also allow other people to create installers without having to know all the mumbo jumbo around it (merge modules, siteconfig or service config files, etc). I told Kasper that I'd try to get to that as soon as some of my top priorities are out of the way and resume the work on it as I already had uncommitted changes locally and was in the middle of refactoring it. As always, any ideas or advice are welcome. > I know Christopher has already done the initial research/legwork to get > that upgrade rolling. > Yeah, regarding the electron update, looking forward to get to it. Dunno how it's coming, but when I tried moving to electron 6 I had several problems with some of our deps (see https://github.com/GPII/windows/pull/279/files and https://github.com/GPII/gpii-app/pull/156/files), not sure how's the situation nowadays, maybe Christopher can update us on it. Cheers to the max, Javi > > Moving forward with doing case studies and beta testing completely > remotely, I’m hopeful that the above work resolves at least an initial > brunt of these issues, and then any remaining ones can be triaged > separately, such that installing/uninstalling in a teamviewer or windows > helpdesk thing doesn’t take so long. > > Cheers, > Steve > > > > [1] https://wixtoolset.org/ > [2] Upgrading which I would suspect automagically fix some of the QSS > performance issues > _______________________________________________ > Architecture mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.gpii.net/mailman/listinfo/architecture >
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