Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
On 2009/02/25 5:11 PM, Alex Mandel wrote: Building an msi just adds complication. It could easily be argued that not using an MSI just adds complication for anyone who works in an environment where MSI-based installs are a requirement ;-) I also have not seen any open source tools to do it either. There are some: http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/msi/authoring.htm However, it could be argued that tools used to build the installer for OSGeo4W don't have to be open source, as they are building an installer for a non-open source Operating System. Because typical installers write to registry using an msi prevents you from running more than one at the same time. I'm not clear what you are trying to say with that statement? In terms of security, there's no reason to think an msi is any more secure than an exe Actually, there is. An MSI is "just a database", and is easily examined. That doesn't hold true for executables. However, it's a bit of a moot point, because most MSI-based installations will install one or more executable files, so even with "nothing malicious" in the MSI, there could still be security risks. and running msi require that the end user always have the correct windows installer library installed. Since Microsoft no longer supports some older versions of windows, if a Visual Studio tool was used to build the installer there's a chance older(Win2k,WinXP) users would be out of luck. But that isn't an argument against using an MSI for an installation. MSI-based installs can be created to only apply to specific versions of MS Windows, and can 'fail gracefully' if needed. Even with an MSI that installs on 'all versions of Windows', the installed program(s) may not run, due to differences between MS Windows versions. In other words, it is part of the generic problem of "what OS versions are supported", not a specific problem related to the use of an MSI. -- Dave Patton CIS Canadian Information Systems Victoria, B.C. Degree Confluence Project: Canadian Coordinator Technical Coordinator http://www.confluence.org/ Personal website: Maps, GPS, etc. http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
On 2009/02/25 7:51 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote: nicholas.g.lawre...@mainroads.qld.gov.au wrote: Hello list. Thanks everyone for the great work done with OSGeo4W. I have a strange (maybe) question. I suppose that osgeo4w setup.exe is a fork of the cygwin's setup. Is it possible to view/download its source code? Thanks, Giovanni I have a different question. Is setup.exe the best way to install software on microsoft windows? Has Windows Installer, that is an .msi file been considered? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_installer I know that my IT section has a strong preference for software to be installed via .msi. Nick, Originally we were hopeful about being able to produce MSI files as these are considered to be easier for some IT departments to deploy. But in the end it did not appear that MSI files provide support for many of the things we wanted to address. Notably - fine grained packages, dependencies, upgrade versioning, and only downloading the parts that are needed from the net. I would like to think that the OSGeo4W .tar.bz2 package files could still be repackaged as MSI files for specific situations. Frank's last sentence explains what will happen in some organizations, no matter how the OSGeo4W 'installer' is created. Where I work, any product that is going to be installed on 'more than a few' workstations has to be "packaged". If the vendor's software (e.g. OSGeo4W) is provided as a "setup.exe", then that will be 'exploded', and the component parts (files, registry settings, shortcuts, etc) are all included in an MSI file. If the vendor supplies their software in an MSI, then we never modify that MSI, but will always add an MST (a file that is used during the installation to Transform the MSI). Our MST might simply add properties to control how the installation takes place (e.g. suppress all user interaction), or it might be 'more intrusive', to the point of not installing parts of the vendor's software package. As for the flexibility of using an MSI, they can be very flexible, so I'm not sure what limitations were encountered in regards to OSGeo4W. They can likely be overcome, however, like anything else, it may take some time/effort, and the choice might be to spend that time/effort on other things. -- Dave Patton CIS Canadian Information Systems Victoria, B.C. Degree Confluence Project: Canadian Coordinator Technical Coordinator http://www.confluence.org/ Personal website: Maps, GPS, etc. http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
> > Is setup.exe the best way to install software on microsoft windows? > > > > Has Windows Installer, that is an .msi file been considered? > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_installer > > > > I know that my IT section has a strong preference for software > > to be installed via .msi. > Nick, > Originally we were hopeful about being able to produce MSI files as these > are considered to be easier for some IT departments to deploy. But in > the end it did not appear that MSI files provide support for many of the > things we wanted to address. Notably - fine grained packages, dependencies, > upgrade versioning, and only downloading the parts that are needed from the > net. > I would like to think that the OSGeo4W .tar.bz2 package files could still > be repackaged as MSI files for specific situations. Perhaps I should provide some context. My department deploys software using Novell ZENworks, also known as NAL (Novell Application Launcher). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell_ZENworks In the past we have had struggled with software that is provided as a setup.exe but software provided as an .msi works well. But I suppose it doesn't necessarily have to be .msi as long as it plays well with ZENworks. Also, since the majority of people in my organisation do not have access to the net, it would be necessary for all files to be included in the NAL object. Is anyone else in a similar situation? nick *** WARNING: This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain legally privileged, confidential or private information and may be protected by copyright. You may only use it if you are the person(s) it was intended to be sent to and if you use it in an authorised way. No one is allowed to use, review, alter, transmit, disclose, distribute, print or copy this e-mail without appropriate authority. If this e-mail was not intended for you and was sent to you by mistake, please telephone or e-mail me immediately, destroy any hardcopies of this e-mail and delete it and any copies of it from your computer system. Any right which the sender may have under copyright law, and any legal privilege and confidentiality attached to this e-mail is not waived or destroyed by that mistake. It is your responsibility to ensure that this e-mail does not contain and is not affected by computer viruses, defects or interference by third parties or replication problems (including incompatibility with your computer system). Opinions contained in this e-mail do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Queensland Department of Main Roads, Queensland Transport or Maritime Safety Queensland, or endorsed organisations utilising the same infrastructure. *** ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
Yves Moisan wrote: Frank and all, On a related note, I'm building a large NSIS installer for our application which includes a bunch of things, among which several MS4W/OSGEO4W web-related packages. Because of operational constraints, the installer must run without an internet connection so I found embedding the MS4W executable with a local zip file in my installer to be the easiest way to do that. Is there a way to do something similar with OSGEO4W ? Yves, The way I'd suggest approaching an NSIS based installer for a particular suite of packages from OSGeo4W is to do an install of what you want and then build the NSIS installer from that installed image. If you want the install to be relocatable then a non-trivial effort would also be required to collect the set of post install .bat scripts for the installed packages, and run them all from the NSIS installer with the environment set up appropriate (to reset paths, etc). If you were willing to fix a location for the install (ie. C:\MyPackage) then this post install work would not be required, and the only extra work would be creating any desired shortcuts on the desktop and in the start menu. Also, a couple of months ago I set up a system with OSGEO4W and IIRC some gdal tools weren't working as they used to on an MS4W setup. Is it me or is the OSGEO4W setup isn't quite the same as MS4W at the end of the day ? They general approach is similiar for layout but the mechanism for initialization scripts (for instance) is quite different. Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmer...@pobox.com light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| Geospatial Programmer for Rent ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
Frank and all, On a related note, I'm building a large NSIS installer for our application which includes a bunch of things, among which several MS4W/OSGEO4W web-related packages. Because of operational constraints, the installer must run without an internet connection so I found embedding the MS4W executable with a local zip file in my installer to be the easiest way to do that. Is there a way to do something similar with OSGEO4W ? Also, a couple of months ago I set up a system with OSGEO4W and IIRC some gdal tools weren't working as they used to on an MS4W setup. Is it me or is the OSGEO4W setup isn't quite the same as MS4W at the end of the day ? Cheers, Yves ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
nicholas.g.lawre...@mainroads.qld.gov.au wrote: Hello list. Thanks everyone for the great work done with OSGeo4W. I have a strange (maybe) question. I suppose that osgeo4w setup.exe is a fork of the cygwin's setup. Is it possible to view/download its source code? Thanks, Giovanni I have a different question. Is setup.exe the best way to install software on microsoft windows? Has Windows Installer, that is an .msi file been considered? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_installer I know that my IT section has a strong preference for software to be installed via .msi. Nick, Originally we were hopeful about being able to produce MSI files as these are considered to be easier for some IT departments to deploy. But in the end it did not appear that MSI files provide support for many of the things we wanted to address. Notably - fine grained packages, dependencies, upgrade versioning, and only downloading the parts that are needed from the net. I would like to think that the OSGeo4W .tar.bz2 package files could still be repackaged as MSI files for specific situations. Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmer...@pobox.com light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| Geospatial Programmer for Rent ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
Building an msi just adds complication. I also have not seen any open source tools to do it either. In reality an msi is just a microsoft compressed database format they invented. Because typical installers write to registry using an msi prevents you from running more than one at the same time. In the case of the QGIS installer and other products on the osgeo4w, the exe doesn't actually write to the registry. It's more like a self extracted zip file, that also creates shortcuts. The normal qgis installer was also exe based as it is built using the extremely common open source installer tool from Nullsoft (the makers of winamp) In terms of security, there's no reason to think an msi is any more secure than an exe and running msi require that the end user always have the correct windows installer library installed. Since Microsoft no longer supports some older versions of windows, if a Visual Studio tool was used to build the installer there's a chance older(Win2k,WinXP) users would be out of luck. Alex nicholas.g.lawre...@mainroads.qld.gov.au wrote: >> Hello list. >> Thanks everyone for the great work done with OSGeo4W. >> I have a strange (maybe) question. I suppose that osgeo4w setup.exe is >> a fork of the cygwin's setup. Is it possible to view/download its >> source code? > >> Thanks, Giovanni > > I have a different question. > > Is setup.exe the best way to install software on microsoft windows? > > Has Windows Installer, that is an .msi file been considered? > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_installer > > I know that my IT section has a strong preference for software > to be installed via .msi. > > Regards, > nick > > > *** > WARNING: This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain legally > privileged, confidential or private information and may be protected by > copyright. You may only use it if you are the person(s) it was intended > to be sent to and if you use it in an authorised way. No one is > allowed to use, review, alter, transmit, disclose, distribute, print > or copy this e-mail without appropriate authority. > > If this e-mail was not intended for you and was sent to you by mistake, > please telephone or e-mail me immediately, destroy any hardcopies of > this e-mail and delete it and any copies of it from your computer > system. Any right which the sender may have under copyright law, and > any legal privilege and confidentiality attached to this e-mail is not > waived or destroyed by that mistake. > > It is your responsibility to ensure that this e-mail does not contain > and is not affected by computer viruses, defects or interference by > third parties or replication problems (including incompatibility with > your computer system). > > Opinions contained in this e-mail do not necessarily reflect the > opinions of the Queensland Department of Main Roads, Queensland > Transport or Maritime Safety Queensland, or endorsed organisations > utilising the same infrastructure. > *** > ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
> Hello list. > Thanks everyone for the great work done with OSGeo4W. > I have a strange (maybe) question. I suppose that osgeo4w setup.exe is > a fork of the cygwin's setup. Is it possible to view/download its > source code? > Thanks, Giovanni I have a different question. Is setup.exe the best way to install software on microsoft windows? Has Windows Installer, that is an .msi file been considered? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_installer I know that my IT section has a strong preference for software to be installed via .msi. Regards, nick *** WARNING: This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain legally privileged, confidential or private information and may be protected by copyright. You may only use it if you are the person(s) it was intended to be sent to and if you use it in an authorised way. No one is allowed to use, review, alter, transmit, disclose, distribute, print or copy this e-mail without appropriate authority. If this e-mail was not intended for you and was sent to you by mistake, please telephone or e-mail me immediately, destroy any hardcopies of this e-mail and delete it and any copies of it from your computer system. Any right which the sender may have under copyright law, and any legal privilege and confidentiality attached to this e-mail is not waived or destroyed by that mistake. It is your responsibility to ensure that this e-mail does not contain and is not affected by computer viruses, defects or interference by third parties or replication problems (including incompatibility with your computer system). Opinions contained in this e-mail do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Queensland Department of Main Roads, Queensland Transport or Maritime Safety Queensland, or endorsed organisations utilising the same infrastructure. *** ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
Thanks Frank! 2009/2/25 Frank Warmerdam : > G. Allegri wrote: >> >> Hello list. >> Thanks everyone for the great work done with OSGeo4W. >> I have a strange (maybe) question. I suppose that osgeo4w setup.exe is >> a fork of the cygwin's setup. Is it possible to view/download its >> source code? > > Giovanni, > > Yes, it is available in svn at: > > http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/trunk/setup/ > > Some more information it is available at: > > http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/wiki/SetupDevelopment > > Best regards, > -- > ---+-- > I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, > warmer...@pobox.com > light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam > and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent > > ___ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@lists.osgeo.org > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
G. Allegri wrote: Hello list. Thanks everyone for the great work done with OSGeo4W. I have a strange (maybe) question. I suppose that osgeo4w setup.exe is a fork of the cygwin's setup. Is it possible to view/download its source code? Giovanni, Yes, it is available in svn at: http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/trunk/setup/ Some more information it is available at: http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/wiki/SetupDevelopment Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmer...@pobox.com light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| Geospatial Programmer for Rent ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] osgeo4w setup.exe source code?
Hello list. Thanks everyone for the great work done with OSGeo4W. I have a strange (maybe) question. I suppose that osgeo4w setup.exe is a fork of the cygwin's setup. Is it possible to view/download its source code? Thanks, Giovanni ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
