Hi, I have got Alice to build (and the test suite to mostly work) on Windows XP, with some modifications, apart from the final step of creating the installer. This seems to rely on Installshield - with its hefty price tag - is there any way around this? Gareth
Hi Gareth. > I have got Alice to build (and the test suite to mostly work) on > Windows XP, with some modifications, apart from the final step of > creating the installer. Cool! > This seems to rely on Installshield - with its hefty price tag - is > there any way around this? Apart from not using MSI as the distribution format, probably not. Maybe there are some free tools that can build MSIs, but I wouldn't know, and haven't looked in years. To be honest, I always found MS's packaging tool rather annoying, in particular, since it couldn't be automated properly, and all configuration had to be done in a tedious GUI. These days I would probably opt for something else (e.g. the Nullsoft installer seems pretty common, but I have never looked at it). /Andreas
On 3 Jul 2011, at 12:38, Andreas Rossberg wrote: > Hi Gareth. > >> I have got Alice to build (and the test suite to mostly work) on Windows XP, with some modifications, apart from the final step of creating the installer. > > Cool! > >> This seems to rely on Installshield - with its hefty price tag - is there any way around this? > > Apart from not using MSI as the distribution format, probably not. Maybe there are some free tools that can build MSIs, but I wouldn't know, and haven't looked in years. > > To be honest, I always found MS's packaging tool rather annoying, in particular, since it couldn't be automated properly, and all configuration had to be done in a tedious GUI. These days I would probably opt for something else (e.g. the Nullsoft installer seems pretty common, but I have never looked at it). We use the wix toolkit (http://wix.sourceforge.net/, open source from Microsoft) for Gecode. It's free and scriptable, you just have to specify what goes in the msi using XML. But it's probably still a lot of work to write wix specs for Alice. Cheers, Guido -- -- Guido Tack, http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~guido.tack/
On 12/07/11 13:29, Guido Tack wrote: > On 3 Jul 2011, at 12:38, Andreas Rossberg wrote: >> Apart from not using MSI as the distribution format, probably not. Maybe there are some free tools that can build MSIs, but I wouldn't know, and haven't looked in years. >> >> To be honest, I always found MS's packaging tool rather annoying, in particular, since it couldn't be automated properly, and all configuration had to be done in a tedious GUI. These days I would probably opt for something else (e.g. the Nullsoft installer seems pretty common, but I have never looked at it). > We use the wix toolkit (http://wix.sourceforge.net/, open source from Microsoft) for Gecode. It's free and scriptable, you just have to specify what goes in the msi using XML. But it's probably still a lot of work to write wix specs for Alice. > Wix does look like a nice way of generating MSIs, but as you say it looks like a lot of work (particularly for someone not well acquainted with Windows Installer). NSIS also looks interesting (and with less of a learning curve). Inno Setup looks interesting too. I have read a lot of crap about Install Shield though! It is bizarre that it is so widely used. Thanks for your responses Gareth
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