Rony, thank you for your off-line comments and Jeremy, thank you for
your comments.
Both of you have identified a few things that I had not thought of, and
that I will take under advisement.
This has been a large bono project for me, one that started out with
"can you write a quick prototype program that can..." And since the
application required a fair amount of text processing from one or more
sources (and different formats) Rexx was an obvious choice as a
processing language.
I had less problems getting ooRexx and ooSQLite installed by a
non-computerite Ballet School Artistic Director, than I have had in
getting some "Technically" oriented folks to do the same...
The first version of my application is intended to provide a working
prototype for a small test group in an attempt to firm up the
specifications and overall requirements for a final version. Now that I
have accomplished that, the overall project has become, "but running
three installers will be too difficult for some to handle..." along with
a a few comments like, "can't this look like a windows dialog with fill
in the boxes, and checkboxes/radio buttons, and... instead of asking
questions and accepting responses?"
I've gone this far, I will see what else I can do.
If nothing else, I will end up learning what is under the hood of an
installer -- and maybe telling my "customer", I can do this for win-10
64-bit, but the other environments will take longer...
Thanks again, and hopefully a few other folks will also have some good
suggestions.
(Sure do wish that MicroSoft hadn't removed Rexx as a standard package
under windows years ago.
Things would be a lot easier right now...)
/s/ Bill Turner, wb4alm
On 3/22/21 8:59 PM, Jeremy Nicoll wrote:
On Mon, 22 Mar 2021, at 15:47, Bill Turner, WB4ALM wrote:
Folks, I have a possible "opportunity" that might allow the introduction
of ooRexx as an application scripting language to several hundred
independently owned windows system owners using WIN-7 thru WIN-10
Having a potential target of Win 7 onwards will complicate this I
think as will both 32-bit and 64-bit target systems.
The slight possibility that some users might already have ooREXX
installed - so you'd want your install of ooREXX for your app not to
interfere with any extant install - will make it worse.
Suppose in future someone wanted to run two versions of your app
that had been shipped with different bundled versions of ooREXX?
How would you manage that?
Did I read somewhere that someone had developed a sort of
"Portable" installer for ooREXX v5? If that's so, that might help.
I am not familiar with the creation of an installation package for
windows, and am looking for information with recommendations
on how to create a single, but complete installation package for
both ooRexx V5 and ooSQLite.
Unless you're somehow able to combine the installers for the
separate products into one monster installer, I expect that will be
hard and might require you to write a new installer to do the job
from scratch.
I don't know what the v5 installer is like, but I recall that the v4.2.0
one didn't work properly for me on Win 8.1. I chose to override
some of the defaults - which the installer allowed me to do - but
it didn't seem to me that it then made all the right changes in the
registry to implement the choices I'd made. Even now I'm not sure
that I subsequently "fixed" that properly. I'm not looking forward
to installing v5 (eventually) or maybe v4.2.0 on new (to me) W10
systems.
The changes concerned were to do with the names of the filetypes
used for execs to be run by rexx.exe / rexxhide.exe / rexxpaws.exe
and I also wanted to significantly shorten the verbose descriptions
that the system set up for such files, so that eg
"ooRexx Rexx GUI Program"
was replaced by something much terser.
The method (ie registry keys) I'd altered in Win XP to achieve this
were not the same as those needing changed in Win 8.1 (I think).
It's possible that W7 / W8.1 / W10 are all different in how it's
done.
(I did discuss this with a developer way back then but he
basically said I'd need to fiddle with the installer code
myself if I wanted to fix it, and didn't have the time etc
to do that, so didn't. I also didn't know the right way to
make those changes; it is one thing to fiddle around in
the registry on my own pc where it's my fault if I break
something, but quite another thing to maybe introduce
mistakes that would affect other people's pcs.)
It's not that I'm suggesting that if you had an installer for your
bundled thing that you'd need to allow overrides - clearly you'd
not want to do that - but writing an installer that might need to
do different things on different target systems might be quite a
struggle.
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