Hi Rob.
I can't begin to tell you how much any work in this regard means to a
lot of us. I'm waiting until I find a decent, customizable bootstrapper
solution before switching all of our installations to WiX.
I'd love to see more information on where you're going with it. I've put
quite a lot of thought on what I'd like to see.
Joel Peterson
Quality Engineer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rob
Mensching
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 1:21 AM
To: Jim Hewes; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Building a setup.exe
I'm slowly making progress on a new tool for the WiX toolset called
"burn" (see:
http://robmensching.com/blog/archive/2007/04/10/WiX-v3-Roadmap-Draft.asp
x). It is a generic bootstrapper that will eventually handle the things
you list below. It's slow going and not really anything in a state to
share yet. If only I could sleep less... <smile/>
Anyway, that's where I'm moving towards. The existing setupexe project
is as limited as you point out.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jim Hewes
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 1:36 PM
To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [WiX-users] Building a setup.exe
I've been working on building an installer using Wix. Building an msi
seems to work well and I have no major problem. But where I'm getting
bogged down is in the things surrounding it, such as the setup.exe
program. I have a couple of questions.
1. I've noticed the setupbld.exe utility and I've tried it. It seems to
create a setup.exe with all files packed into a single EXE, which are
then extracted at runtime. That's good. But in addition to that, I also
need a setup.exe that will launch loose, uncompressed files for
installation from a CD. Can it currently do that as well?
2. This isn't so much a question as a feature request. I need for to the
setup.exe to show a language selection dialog to allow the user to
select an installation language (like Installshield does). I think I
will probably try to add it myself to the setupexe project if it never
gets added by the Wix guys.
3. I read about chaining as a way of handling more than one
installation. I currently have this requirement, since I need to install
a driver and also an application that works with the product. For
various reasons, it's better for us not to package these in the same
installer. But chaining doesn't seem like an ideal solution either---I
think that automatically launching one installer after another can be
confusing to the end user.
I think a better solution, at least for CD installation, is to begin
with a menu. The menu allows the user to choose what to install; that
is, which installer to run. The menu can list the device installer and
the application installer. It can also allow users to optionally install
things like Adobe Reader if your documentation is in PDF form. I've seen
some products that do this and they have graphically pretty menu
programs.
Unfortunately, in doing a search, I didn't find any decent existing
software for developing such a menu program. Can anyone recommend
something? Sure, perhaps it's really just a dialog with buttons, so you
can probably write one yourself (I'm a C++ programmer). But I was
hoping to find something that included some pre-designed fancy graphics,
and allowed you to slap together a menu launcher in an hour or so with
no programming. Does this make sense? Or am I thinking in the wrong
direction?
Although I like the feeling of working "close to the metal" with Wix as
compared to some commercial product like InstallShield, I also seem to
be getting slowed by the setup.exe issues outside of the actual msi more
than anything.
Thanks for any comments.
Jim
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