Jon Strabala wrote:
>
> > Ian Lamont wrote:
> > >
> > > ever thought about creating an InstallShield clone and integrating it
> > > into mozilla's install components?
>
> How about using XPInstall engine stand alone ? i.e. oputside of
> Mozillia itself I find prioducts like ZeroG and Install Sheild to
> be sorely lacking.
It could easily be done. The first bits the installer downloads is the core
XPCOM engine of mozilla, plus the XPInstall component itself. If you were
using this to install something other than Mozilla the XPCOM engine would be
overhead, an extra 700K someone would have to download.
As part of a Mozilla install this is essentially free, since we need these
files to make Mozilla run anyway.
> > The windows and mac install wizards are already part of the builds and
> > can be obtained from:
> >
> > Mac:
> > ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/MozMacInstaller-M15.sea.bin
> >
> > Win32:
> > ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/mozilla-win32-installer.exe
> >
>
> I believe the above EXE file is a massive 7MB, does this include
> XPInstall engine and the entire Mozillia structure (with a JRE bundle) ?
>
> Could I make an installer for a simple Java (or Win32) based "HelloWorld"
> application rather than Mozillia - if so how big would the
> hello-win32-installer.exe
> be (I hope not 7MB) ?
If you run the windows installer with the '-u' command line argument it will
explode the self-extracting archive without running the install program, and
you can then examine the component pieces. Or you could look at the Netscape
6 installer which is essentially the same thing already in pieces.
You would need to combine the install program (setup.*) the xpcom.xpi
install engine, create a config.ini that describes you product, and a .xpi
that contains your actual payload. The size would be about 700K plus
whatever you're installing.
> I guess I am trying to ask/find out is the XPInstall engine was designed
> to be used stand alone - outside of the context of Mozillia ? If so are there
> any concrete examples (I was unable to find iny in my quick searches) ?
We tried to make it flexible, but since our ultimate goal was to install
Mozilla we use a lot of core XPCOM services rather than duplicate the
functionality in the install part. This kept the install overhead
vanishingly small in our special case, but means the overhead is a bit
larger than necessary if you were to use this apart from Mozilla as you're
discussing.
Without doing great violence to the current code you could probably rebuild
the xpcom engine with large chunks missing that aren't used, but it would
take some work to figure out.
-Dan Veditz
