Hi! I'm preparing the Windows release of Taverna 2.1 beta 2 at the moment, and I've made a nice little installer using a software called NSIS. It now installs a real taverna.exe file and friends to C:\Program files and inserts links into the start menu with an icon and everything. There's even an uninstaller that appears in the control panel!
Now the question is - unless I fiddle a lot around with these NSIS-scripts, you would not be able to install it without administrator privileges. I know many users do not have such access on their machines, so the question is, what do we provide for them? I was thinking of just having two different Windows downloads, taverna-workbench-2.1-b1-installer.exe and something like taverna-workbench-2.1-b1-bundle.zip (any better name than "bundle"?) - where the installer does all the things I said above, and the bundle is just an old-style zip-file the user can extract wherever he wants without system privileges. It would still include the .exe file, but it wouldn't be added to the start menu automatically. The problem with the .zip file is that the default ZIP handler in Windows is extremely buggy and can't handle large archives (Windows just hangs - and in the end only extracts half the files), so the user would 'just have to know' that they have to use 7zip or Winzip to unpack from a .zip. We could make the bundle a self-extracting archive (.exe) using NSIS like we did for Taverna 2.0 - but this gives the impression of being a real installer again - and users got confused with how we did this for Taverna 2.0 - the installer just unzipped to the Desktop by default, and nothing was added to the start menu. 7zip can also make a more basic self-extracting archive which shouldn't give the "Installer" impression - so I'm tempted to go for this option for the 'bundle' version. What are your thoughts? I've also briefly looked at making an .msi file (Windows Installer) - but the tools for this seem either non-free or don't work (WiX) - too bad as .msi files are the favourites for sysadmins installing software in big student labs.. Anyone with experience on this? -- Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team School of Computer Science The University of Manchester ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ taverna-hackers mailing list [email protected] Web site: http://www.taverna.org.uk Mailing lists: http://www.taverna.org.uk/taverna-mailing-lists/ Developers Guide: http://www.mygrid.org.uk/tools/developer-information
