[Zope3-dev] Changes to zope3 windows binary installer

[Roger Ineichen]

Tim,

don't use InnoSetup, take a look at www.bitrock.com first.

The BitRock InstallBuilder is a amazing pice of software.
I use it for build custom installers including Zope3, Tiks 
and some custom libraries for customer projects.

"BitRock is a multiplatform installation tool for Linux, 
Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, AIX, HP-UX and Solaris you 
can create native installers that are easy to use and 
run in GUI, text and unattended modes."

I think the posibility to use this software on every platform 
and build installers for every platform is reason enough for 
take a look at BitRock.

Regards
Roger Ineichen

> -----Original Message-----
> From: zope3-dev-bounces+dev=projekt01.ch at zope.org 
> [mailto:zope3-dev-bounces+dev=projekt01.ch at zope.org] On 
> Behalf Of Tim Peters
> Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2005 8:37 PM
> To: Stephan Richter; Michael Haubenwallner
> Cc: zope3-dev at zope.org
> Subject: Re: [Zope3-dev] Changes to zope3 windows binary installer
> 
> [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.
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