Back in the ancient days when I got Delphi, it was bundled with a version of InstallShield. Can ya'll recommend any decent -- preferably free -- replacements? If you like the Windows installer system, can anyone point me to a decent tutorial explaining how to use it?

Thanks,

Dave

I use Inno Setup <http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php> it is Pascal based. I can't compare it to others because it is the only one I have used in earnest.

David M. Lawrence wrote

InstallShield. ?Can ya'll recommend any decent -- preferably free -- replacements?

http://www.installjammer.com/

https://sourceforge.net/projects/mseinstaller/

Never used any of them, but they are open source and free. The latter one is implemented in Object Pascal as well.

I have also create a cross-platform installer for our company, but I haven't received the okay yet to release it as open source.

David M. Lawrence wrote

Back in the ancient days when I got Delphi, it was bundled with a version of InstallShield. ?Can ya'll recommend any decent -- preferably free -- replacements? ?If you like the Windows installer system, can anyone point me to a decent tutorial explaining how to use it?

I can strongly recommend the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset:

http://wix.sourceforge.net/

It's an interface to the Windows Installer where you define all the specifics of your project in an XML file. It the compiles and links into an msi file. Documentation and tutorials are good. I've switched some of our products over to it and we haven't looked back. It even does automatic driver installs.

Henry

Henry Vermaak wrote

It's an interface to the Windows Installer where you define all the specifics of your project in an XML file. ?It the compiles and links into an msi file.

I can't comment on WiX (never knew about it), but I can say our company had terrible experiences with Windows Installer (msi files). Apps kept restoring, it's a bitch to actually uninstall an app, upgrading apps where a nightmare too. So much so, what we reverted back to an old version of InstallShield Developer. So I guess your mileage my vary. :-/

I can second that bad experience. Recently I was short on disk space, and wanted to uninstall several applications. Unfortunately the MSI rejected the uninstalls - due to lack of disk space :-(

DoDi

Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote

I can second that bad experience. Recently I was short on disk space, and wanted to uninstall several applications. Unfortunately the MSI rejected the uninstalls - due to lack of disk space :-(

We have had that too. Makes you wonder what the Microsoft guys are smoking? :-)

Regards,
- Graeme -

I wonder if I could phrase the OP's question in a slightly different way.

Allowing that Linux and other unix-style OSes have package formats of various kinds, and allowing that an MSI file is just another implementation of the same sort of thing, is there a "meta installer" that can at the very least be used to build dependency lists etc.?

Debian and derivatives have a utility called alien that can be used to convert between package formats, but it seems to me to be unfortunate if a programmer has to go through a sequence of stages to build a package for Debian, another for Ubuntu which might have different locations or symlinks for e.g. database libraries, another for Fedora and then finally something similar for Windows.

Another Ballmer Peak ;) ?
http://xkcd.com/323/

l. ;)

Probably a badly constructed msi file. Who made it? I've never had bad installers with wix generated msi (and I've made hundreds). It compiles the xml first, so it can give warnings/errors.

Henry

I guess so, but as you say, it probably would only be a skeleton. Which I think is fine. Things like driver installs are totally different, even between linux distros. There are installers that bypass the os specific installing mechanisms (e.g. just copy files). I think this is a supremely bad idea. The various package managers have saved me lots of hassle over the years.

I agree, it's a massive pain. Perhaps someone will come up with some clever specification that everyone will adhere to. Most likely not.

Henry

The thing that seems really painful to me is that a program which (say) uses database facilities would have to have a way of asking the target OS's package system for the name of the package that contained the appropriate libraries. This probably implies talking to a repository server, and also implies a build-time decision as to what versions of each distro it is to be qualified for.

Some years ago, when I had to dig into automake, I got the idea of an platform manager. We already have OS specific parts in the FPC libraries, which could be extended for more services. Then we only have to agree about the API, and find a person for every OS, which keeps the extensions up to date.

DoDi