Hey everybody, I've just pushed a very ghetto CouchDB installer based on the standard Windows MSI packaging technology.
If you're confused by now, then you can skip the rest of this email... https://github.com/wincouch/msicouch There's an MSI raring to go at https://github.com/downloads/wincouch/MsiCouch/Apache_CouchDB_1.0.2.msi but I've not had a fresh box to test on so I hope its not missing any erlang-fu or couch-fu. Why is this important? Well, MSI installers deliver a whole lot more functionality than the current inno setup one: - configuring windows firewall settings for erl.exe, werl.exe, epmd.exe etc. - able to be deployed directly to PCs using Active Directory GPO (Group Policy) - can be chained or integrated into other products cleanly and transparently - long-term would allow other vendors to piggyback their apps on Erlang or CouchDB - extensive dependency management & rollback capabilities - offers the best approach for deploying updated CouchDB packages in a large deployment Features so far: - it has less functionality than the inno installer we currently use ... but ... - it's an MSI (woot) - it doesn't do services (but you can do this yourself using erlsrv.exe anyway) - it doesn't seem to delete your data on rollback but it does trash local.ini (not really a feature) - it has a cooler banner logo than the inno package (really important but could be improved on) It's based on free/opensource WarSetup + WixEdit + WiX 3.5 and doesn't require a commercial release of Visual Studio to work. There are infinitely better commercial installer packages but it's important that CouchDB can be built with a free toolchain.... even if the OS isn't free! Feedback is a gift -> https://github.com/wincouch/msicouch/issues and please let me know what features you would like to see in future. Cheers Dave
