Upayavira wrote:
Hugo Burm wrote:
I had some fun with the NSIS installer for Windows ...................
I initially proposed a Cocoon installer based upon AntInstaller, because
I was starting to use it for my own stuff. I then switched to NSIS,
which is more capable. However, here's some comments:
1. NSIS, while powerful, is a real step backwards in software
development terms. It feels like C scripting, with replete with
pre-processing instructions. Having said that, it _did_ produce
a nice installer.
The real reason I like NSIS is because I have a CMS on a Linux
(Zope/Plone) platform. And my NSIS script can produce a Windows
Setup.exe on the fly on this Linux platform. (This is a familiar
situation, a server running Linux, and 99% of the customers running Windows)
I agree, programming for NSIS reminds me of an RCA 1802, but I am also
familiar with the alternatives for Windows (Wise and InstallShield). At
the moment I am programming my Wise scripts in UltraEdit.....
NSIS has a small footprint, it is fast, it is free, and it is well
documented. You can interfere with the OS. You can add all the eye-candy
you want. What else do you want? (cross-platform :-) ).
2. Any installer for Cocoon _must_ be able to handle dependencies
between blocks. This is not a trivial task in _any_ installer
package, I would suspect
I considered offering different versions of Cocoon to the end user
(minimal versus full). In this simple approach the installer does not
need to know anything about dependencies between blocks. The installer
just has to select the correct .cab or .zip or whatever pre-build
configuration of Cocoon. With an MSI installer you can minimize the
download. But in the end, I decided to give up on that and supplied the
user with the full distro. Saving 10 Mb on a distribution of 73 Mb is
not worth the extra effort.
3. As has been said, we cannot distribute a Sun JVM with Cocoon from an
Apache server. However, we could potentially distribute it from
somewhere else. But, for an installer to survive, its maintenance
needs to be taken on by the whole community.
I don't think my installer will survive. It was just a quick example
about what can be done. It will die as soon as something better is
available.
4. A pure java swing GUI for installing Cocoon, along with block
dependency handling, was committed to our whiteboard
(http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cocoon/whiteboard/guilder)
That could be used.
See my answer to Antonio about IzPack
