My 2p worth... Since you are considering only a MSVS environment, it looks far more professional to have something like InstallShield. Creating it would seem to be a relatively trivial task (when I watched someone else create one using a VS 2003 InstallShield wizard in about 15 seconds). The only fly in the ointment is deciding on a version that supports VS 7 (2003), 8 (2005) and 9 (2008).
As to online and offline installers, I would go for offline everytime because I have worked on simulator sites that will never be connected to the internet. It also means that come the fateful day when the hard disk dies, the complete install is available from a local security backup rather than relying on a hosting website to still be holding the exact version required to restore the system. (This is a long term support issue - when was the last time you tried to buy a 40MB Winchester hard disk??!! -- oops age showing) PhilT -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]on Behalf Of Sukender Sent: 23 February 2009 23:51 To: OpenSceneGraph Users Subject: [osg-users] Packaging distribution under Windows Hi all Windows users (and others too, I'm not doing discrimination ;) ), Under Linux (& co), packages can have dependencies. Under Windows, we're far to have such an easy system. Question is: how could we redistribute efficiently the OSG binaries (I mean when not linking statically) alongside our apps? Here are my suggestions, please share your thoughts. 1. Manually copy the DLLs in the app's dir. That becomes a pain if you select each DLL by hand, and you may have multiple copies for each app. 2. Say to the user (s)he must download the OSG binaires. Not very user firendly, IMO. 3. Create a nice installer that contains the OSG packages. Thus the installer become obese since we don't need all the DLLs... 4. Create a nice installer that contains partial packages. Not very "clean" to begin splitting packages I think. 5. Create a nice installer that will download packages on the web. Nice, but what about installing on a machine that has no connection? Should we provide both "online" and "offline" installers? And about installers... Should we copy the DLLs to the system dir? What about Vista and its strange policies about having access to system dirs (I simply stayed under XP :D )? Thank you! PS: It seems I'm going to have an installer (or such) ten times bigger than my app... (sigh) Sukender PVLE - Lightweight cross-platform game engine - http://pvle.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
