Hi John,

I looked at this already (bless irc) and it looks great.. chm manual option's a nice touch :)

The main questions I have about it are:

1) I didn't notice anywhere to choose the path for the install. (This might be because I only tested with cli?) That makes it kinda hard to figure out where the installed version went :) I eventually found it in PROGRA~1, which might be the default for registry-based installations but was (perhaps strangely) not where I'd have immediately expected it to be from a desktop test install. 2) Same goes for the php.ini, the whereabouts of which can be fairly critical depending on the setup.
(Those two I think are probably important.)

3) is there some way to have (version-compatible) components 'install on demand', rather than download the whole lot at one go?
(Would be useful if...)

4) enabling extensions via the installer at present simply means adding them to the end of the existing php.ini, i.e. the same module can be listed twice, once disabled and once enabled. Is there no way to do a search and replace on the existing string or simply write that part of the file from scratch? - because at present, people will still need to make manual modifications to their .ini following installation, and it's confusing. 5) is there - or will there be - a way to update components via the installer? or even the core? (would mean disabling/deleting non-compatible components) 6) is there - or will there be - any way to set up the chosen server configuration via the installer (for all servers or even just for Apache?) - again, I didn't test with a server install so this might be in place already. 7) how about further php.ini modifications? - remembering that the existence of many directives depends on the extensions installed.
(These come under 'would be sweet if...')

Further comment: I personally think it creates more problems than it solves to differentiate between core and PECL extensions. IMHO it'd be better to throw them all together in alphabetical order and simply have everything 'already on' that is enabled by default. This'll also help when items get shifted around, as they inevitably do... components shipped with the core that aren't yet in PECL would need to be downloaded with the core anyway because there's no other way to reach them individually, so there _is_ that difference, but that 'core list' is not writ in stone and changes quite frequently.

Just some feedback - even if you do nothing more to it it's still pretty neat :)

- Steph

oh ps - PEAR install yes/no doesn't appear to work - you get .phar either way. Is that intentional for now?


----- Original Message ----- From: "John Mertic" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <internals@lists.php.net>
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 4:52 PM
Subject: [PHP-DEV] New Installer for PHP 5.2


Hi there,

With the guidance of Phil Driscoll, I have put together a new
installer for PHP on Windows. It replicates much of the same
functionality of his installer, but also boasts the following
features:

- Selective installation of all PHP components ( CGI and CLI exes,
server modules, standard and PECL extensions ).
- Configures the php.ini for the installation, including enabling the
extensions the user selected to install.
- Built as an MSI using Wix (http://wix.sourceforge.net) which is
scriptable and open source so we can include the code to build the
installer in cvs and automate building it. Also MSI Installers are
very useful for Sys Admins since they integrate into Group Policies to
allow unattended installation, and are better supported on Windows in
general.

Thanks to Edin Kadribasic, the public test version ( which installs a
recent snapshot of PHP 5.2 ) is located at
http://downloads.php.net/edink/php-5.2.0-win32-installer.msi.

I am looking for feedback on the installer, namely in the following areas:

- Default install options; what should the default install consist of?
- Lite Installer. The current install file weighs in at 18mb. Would we
want a lite installer with fewer components and if so what would those
be?

--
Later,

John Mertic
"Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                                       understand it
better, but the frog dies in the

process."

                                            -Mark Twain

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