Re: GSoC project about binary packaging

[Anirudha Bose]

On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 8:19 PM, Patrick Noffke <address@hidden> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 5:02 AM, PhilipNienhuis <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> So the good thing for cross-compiling is that it is a lot faster (>12-14 hrs
> natively vs. a little over 2 hours cross, on the same core-i5 machine, for
> Octave + all dependencies).
>

I'm not sure what impact this has on the choice of installer.  We
still want to support both native and cross builds, right?  If you're
getting at the fact that msi-tools is a subset (not sure what that
means, exactly) of WiX, then yes, this is a possible concern.

>
> Could you tell us what advantages and disadvantages .msi files have compared
> to an .exe installer?
>

I don't have any experience with NSIS, but one guy on stackoverflow
suggests that .msi files should be used for "corporate" deployment.
See the answers from saschabeaumont in the two following links:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1903145/nsis-vs-wix-vs-anyother-installation-package
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/458900/free-software-for-windows-installers-nsis-vs-wix

I think he's referring to IT environments that lock down users from
installing (and do automatic installs), but I'm not sure why .exes
can't be used in this case.  Would that possibly be a concern for
Octave (i.e. do we want Octave to be deployed in such environments)?

Here is another guys's take on WiX vs. other (non-MSI) installers.
His basic point is that uninstalls are more reliable with MSIs.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/firebreath-dev/Ddee0DQL764/9PoPHtdTRR8J

One disadvantage of going the MSI route is the steep learning curve
(though I can help get us started), and, as you point out, there is
already some work done around NSIS for Octave.  I also could not
figure out how to run another MSI from within an MSI.  I've read that
you need a "bootstrapper," but I couldn't figure out how to do this in
the time I spent on my project.  My solution was to package the MSI
within my MSI and require the user to run it after installing my MSI.

Indeed. I found the tutorials somewhat difficult to follow. I have written a basic installer using NSIS for Octave which does nothing other than dump the files in the installation directory. Can you provide a similar basic XML file to help me understand WiX?

We need some more features in the installer like checking for JRE, adding environment variables after the installation, letting the user choose between OpenBLAS and reference BLAS, and installing octave-forge packages. How do you propose to do these using WiX?

I also though I read somewhere that you could deploy both 32- and
64-bit binaries within the same MSI, but this turns out to not be
possible.

Patrick