Daniel Veditz wrote: > It sounds like you want something like the stub downloaders, which is > built on XPInstall. You can do this, but there will be more overhead > for a non-mozilla application. For Mozilla the only overhead is the > 200K stub, because the "install engine" used (xpcom.xpi) turns out to > be a core part of Mozilla that we would have installed anyway. For a > non-Mozilla application you will still have to download xpcom.xpi for > use as the engine but it will be pure overhead. > > Not that I want to discourage uses of our technology, but if you're > already used to InstallShield what problems are you trying to solve? > There will be costs to switching, so to make sense from an > engineering POV the gain has to be worthwhile.
Well, the benefit seems to be that the stub installer actually does a very good job and comes with a lot of features: displaying a license, prompting for a directory, different install types (custom, Full, etc.), displaying a summary page, custom install pages (e.g. prompting for Quick Launch under Win32). How big is xpcom.xpi? If it's only a few hunderd KB than it's still a lot less than the InstallShield overhead, while at the same times offering more functionality than NSIS (which is on the other end of the spectrum as the installer with the least overhead). Just for testing, I compiled a Mozilla install using NSIS and bzip2 compression and it was only 500 KB or so smaller than the regular Mozilla install...which was pretty impressive considering how much more functionality is in the Mozilla installer. Congrats to the Mozilla team for such a fine piece of technology...but making it useful elsewhere is not such a bad idea! :-) Cheers, Jacek
