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Re: setup.exe sucks


Christopher Faylor schrieb:
As loath as I am to admit it, I think that setup.exe should be scrapped
in favor of one of the other setup projects out there.  We just aren't
doing a good job of keeping up in the innovation or the tech support
department.

I know the reasons that all of the above exist and I TRULY am not
blaming anyone for this state of affairs.  I think it is just time to
call an end to this program which everyone seems to struggle with and
work on providing something better.

People have previously offered other suggestions for setup utilities.
Does anyone have a favorite program that they think would be useful
for the cygwin project?

setup.exe doesn't suck that much. Just the memory footprint sucks, the UI partly sucks, and update cycles suck.

I investigated what other existing packagers do, and how we can use it.
I started working on a complete new rewrite, based on some scripting language, not c++. (easier maintainence and faster development)
Based on some existing packager. We have the only packager not written in a higher level language.


* perl Win32::GUI packaged via par to one single exe for example. mandrake drakex as base. Just the abstract GUI layer for Win32::GUI has to be added. Tk and console backends currently exist. Or maybe tk-native. will get > 3MB
* wxpython compiled to one single exe: Any python installer as base, like yast. ~7MB
* some lisp based UI packager: Currently my favorite. Easiest to write and maintain for single person. ~2MB
* some php-winbinder UI. ~2MB
* some dhtml or java based packager. A webbrowser as requirement should be reasonable. very small
* suneido: This would be very easy to write and maintain. A packager is some kind of "hello world" for suneido, but it would get too large. And it's an orchid language. ~1MB exe and db (which may contain the app also) downloaded on demand.


The main problem are our requirements, that it must be a native windows app, with single-click download/open without any interim installer.
--
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/



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