Re: [Ethereal-dev] fixes for nsis-installer script andmakefile

[Ulf Lamping]

My thought is that the global settings on Win2000/XP/2003 should be
available in the "Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data"
directory, and that user-specific files should reside in the
"Application Data" directory of the user's settings. Please note that
there are Windows-specific variables that are used to find the actual
directory names for the application data and the user profile, but I
don't know those by heart.
 

Please note, that this directory name "Application Data" is hardwired 
inside the Ethereal code,
so this might lead to different locations for installer and Ethereal, 
breaking the installation things.

Please note also, that internationalized windows version will name the 
dir differently, e.g. the german
windows calls this

"Documents and Settings/All Users/Applikationsdaten"

So be *very* sure when changing something here...

I also don't know the NS/IS installer so I don't know if you can
specify whether you want the application(s) to be instlled for the
installing user or for all users on the computer.
 

As this is only a different location for files and such, this could be 
done with some effort.

My nsis script that I use to build the Win32 distribution, adds the
option to install the preference files at install time. They are then
removed by the install when the program is removed. It is nice to give
new users sample color, display, and capture filters when they install
Ethereal. 

There should be some sample files available for *all* platforms, not 
only win32. A distributor then might overwrite with his own settings,
as he might have a different set of files in mind.

They can then uncheck the option if they do not want to
overwrite their existing preference files.
 

Supplying new users with sample configuration is a good thing IMHO.
BUT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, DON'T OVERWRITE PREVIOUS USER SETTINGS BY 
DEFAULT!!!
Sorry to be so "loud", but that's really a very important point!
If the user has previous settings, he should have to select something 
before overwrite things.
In this case it might be also a good idea, to ask him with a dialog box 
or such, if he's really sure.

A nice thing that could be added is that the Ethereal distribution do
much the same thing but I think a check for the existence of the
preference files would be nice and then prompt the user if they wanted
to overwrite.
I used to provide the preference files and then gave instructions on
how to install. But to many time people would call me about problems
because they were not logging into the system with the administrator
user object. The section of the Ethereal.nsi that installs the
preference files reads the APPDATA environment variable to get the
path to the users application data directory.
Section "Preference Files"
;-------------------------------------------
ReadEnvStr $R0 "APPDATA"
CreateDirectory "$R0\Ethereal"
SetOutPath $R0\Ethereal
File "\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application
Data\Ethereal\preferences"
File "\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application
Data\Ethereal\dfilters"
File "\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application
Data\Ethereal\cfilters"
File "\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application
Data\Ethereal\colorfilters"
SectionEnd
 

Would it be good to add :
(from bigtest.nsi )
 IfFileExists "$INSTDIR" 0 NoErrorMsg
   MessageBox MB_OK "Note: $INSTDIR could not be removed!" IDOK 0 ;
   

skipped if file doesn't exist
 

 NoErrorMsg:

to the script?
   

Yes. There are probably a lot of things in the installer which can be
improved. The new NSIS 2 provides perhaps more useful but still unused
features.
 

I managed to run the unistaller while ethereal was active and got
   

all the *.dll's and
 

the directories left.
I don't know if it would be a good idea to try and remove one *.dll
   

first and then do the check
 

so the 'uninstaller' don't get deleted or if there's another better
   

way of doing it?

There should be at leaast some sort of error check or a message for
the
user. I will do some investigation.
 

It might be a better idea to tell the user at uninstallation start to 
close all running instances before continuing.
The uninstaller don't know which files are currently in use when 
starting, so a check on a specific file will
probably not do the job completely.

Should we also ask if the prefs. files should be deleted ?
   

Is there an easy way in nsis to do that?
 

I think NSIS support sections for the uninstaller too. So the user can 
select, which files to be uninstalled.
This should be default to *not* remove the users pref files for the same 
reasons described above!

Regards, ULFL

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