You can do all that stuff with Inno as well and with much more productivity, also Inno is used by many large open source projects as their installer of choice on windows. Inno also supports C style includes so you can have chunks of your installer script reused. One example is the Firebird Database project (I know it's the competition but it's one of the higher profiles ones I know of) I tried the decompiler and you end up with a huge barely readable XML file(hundreds of lines), it's not intuitive at all. MSI is fine when you use it with Wise and they give you a nice interface/IDE.
What do other people on this list think? Should we be supporting MS by using their installer technology?
From what I have seen MSI is NOT superior to Inno, just because it's MS own propriatary (supported) solution does not mean it's the best.
So I guess if you are totally against it I withdraw my offer :-(
Tony Caduto Senior Programmer/Analyst M&I Trust and Investment Management
RE: [ODBC] ODBC Snapshot Installer (for Dave Page)
From: pgsql-odbc-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-odbc-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of anthony.caduto@micorp.com Sent: 06 October 2004 16:59 To: pgsql-odbc@postgresql.org Subject: [ODBC] ODBC Snapshot Installer (for Dave Page)
Dave, I have successfully created a ODBC installer and it looks almost identical to the current MSI one. I looked at the M$ stuff you mentioned and the learning curve is pretty high. I created this one with Inno Setup 5 and it only took a few minutes and is much easier to use than MSI or that xml msi stuff
Like I said, I would be willing to take over creating the installer if you don't mind switching to Inno Setup.
I could also do the setup for PGAdmin III :-)
Hi Tony,
Thanks, however as I said we intentionally use MSI based setup because of the benefits of features such as merge modules, custom actions and the fact that it's Microsoft's supported installation technique. I realise that you dislike supporting them, but there's little sense avoiding using their tools when targeting their platform - especially when they do make them Open Source.
Feel free to try again with Wix if you like - I think I mentioned that it has a decompiler, so porting the installer MSM and then it's MSI files should simply be a case of running the decompiler on each of 2 existing files, and doing a little cleaning work.
