From: Luis Lavena <luislavena@...>
Date: 2008-03-19T09:30:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Yet another Windows installer

On Mar 18, 8:32 pm, Phillip Gawlowski <cmdjackr...@googlemail.com>
wrote:
> Luis Lavena wrote:
>
> > Great! I'm with the idea of use rubygems as official package maanger
> > for OCI, and make it more modular:
>
> > rubyinstaller-minimal: which ships with Ruby+Rubygems+DLL to make
> > extensions works
>
> > rubyinstaller-plus: provide local copy of the latest gems.
>
> > Regarding documenation, another user contributed the CHM version of
> > RDocs, which are searchable and use less disk space when
> > uncompressed :-)
>
> That sounds like a great starting point and a good release plan.
>

Yes, but I'm focusing right now on getting ruby properly build with
MinGW... (link posted previously) -- which seems to have a few
'glitches' that need to be fixed (help is welcome) ;-)

> > It's also possible create installer and patches with InnoSetup, but
> > one of the good things of MSI is that you distribute MSP that can be
> > automatically generated when you compare two versions of the same
> > installer (I'm talking of WiX Tools here).
>
> Ah, I didn't know that. Which means, I'll look into the WiX Tools again.
>

Been using WiX for several projects at office (not OSS) and works
great, the best part is that with 1 rake task you can generate
incremental updates without pain ;-)

> > Yeah, the people who create the installer scripting language have a
> > sadistic sense of humor... or they are too over simplified or they are
> > too over engineered to be actually useful.
>
> Or they are Perl-damaged, what with all the sigils and magic variables..
>
> I've tried to find a solution to dynamically gather files to create an
> installer. I can't make head nor tail out of the sample code I've found.
>

WiX Heat is good for that... it creates a WiX fragment definition that
you can include in a module and generate a installer from it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiX#Tallow.2FHeat

> Ah, well, maybe some kind soul will create an installer with Ruby as
> scripting language. ;)
>

Sounds like reinventing the wheel, but maybe someone could create a
friendlier DSL to use WiX... XML is making my eyes hurt :-P

Regards,
--
Luis Lavena