Installers

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delinquent
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Installers

Post by delinquent »

I've been mulling over this for a little while now. Why isn't there a prepackaged installer that is completely scriptable in .NET, or whatever other language you're using? Every installer I've seen thus far uses some bastardisation of XML - in fact, XML is overused in a lot of things, but that's another story.

I tried both Innosetup, it's counterpart NSIS, and even the WiX toolkit. The latter of these is where I've found the most ease of use, with the help of the WiX cookbook, but it's still far, far too overcomplicated. It's pointless to do an entire registry check and a scan of the installed files/folders in order to create a shortcut, when a far simpler solution would be to set a status flag to true when each item is written to disk. MSI is already really, really bloated, I reckon this would cut off maybe 30% of the thread time required.

To be brutally honest here, I couldn't even get Innosetup or NSIS to work properly - Innosetup gave me a very artifacted installation window, and NSIS simply wouldn't allow me to touch appdata. I'm aware I'm whinging a bit, but haway.

Is it worth building an OOP compliant installer package? Or am I part of a very small minority here?
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Light
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Re: Installers

Post by Light »

NSIS is already set up, but on top of that, I already have the latest version built for both the client and dedicated server. :) Mac uses the old dmg file, Windows packages are installers, then of course the source is just a checkout from bzr.

https://lightron.org/
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delinquent
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Re: Installers

Post by delinquent »

I'm referring to installers in general, not specifically within the confines of Arma. I still haven't managed to get WiX to display an installation window, although it does install my application.
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