[Zope3-dev] Changes to zope3 windows binary installer

[Tim Peters]

[Michael Haubenwallner]
>> I have put up a page of questions regarding the installation process at
>> http://zopewiki.org/Zope3OnWindowsInstaller to help writing down some
>> answers and to create a Howto for windows users.

[Stephan Richter]
> It would be much better to put such documentation on our Wiki, since it will
> got more exposure there. You also probably want to communicate with Tim on
> how to improve the situation.

-1 on the last suggestion <0.1 wink>.  I build the Zope3 Windows
installer because nobody else will do it (and if you disagree with
that statement, _you_ build it from now on ;-)).  I wasn't involved in
creating it, and I don't even know how it works, beyond that it's a
vanilla distutils-based installer.  The text I put on:

    http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/ZopeWindowsRelease

came from trial-and-error reverse-engineering, not from an intimate
understanding of the Zope3-on-Windows vision.

Because it's a standard distutils installer, and because distutils
doesn't really aim at applications (let alone applications on
Windows), there is no support for things like program groups or
auto-install of Windows Services.  The only hope for stuff like that
is for someone to write MS-specific code to run from a
post-installation script (which script distutils will run for you, if
it's set up right) -- or move back to a wholly separate
Windows-specific installer process (as Zope2 uses).  The latter is
high maintenance, and given how few "Windows people" contribute to
Zope, unlikely to happen.  The crushing advantage of a distutils-based
installer is that some other project (namely, the Python project) does
the hard work.

I'll gladly answer any questions about what I wrote on the Wiki page
above, but I can't volunteer more than that.  If I did have time to
work on it, I think I'd write a small InnoSetup script to install
program groups (etc -- this is very hard to do correctly writing to
the raw Windows API; that's why programs like InnoSetup are so
popular), and run _that_ from the distutils post-install script. 
There would surely be lots of problems with that approach too.