Does anyone have experience creating installers for Windows and MacOS X? What are the best free installers?
Marc
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Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:09:57 -0400 From: Marc Feeley feeley@iro.umontreal.ca
Does anyone have experience creating installers for Windows and MacOS X? What are the best free installers?
On OS X, Apple's standard installation mechanism is the .pkg format. However, personally, I think these are counterproductive. They are essentially a mechanism for arbitrary shell scripts to be run as root to install complex software, without recording much information about what effects the scripts had, so there is no standard way to uninstall packages. See `man packagemaker' for more details on building them if you'd like to. Some companies also use their own in-house installer mechanisms that tend to be overcomplicated and not especially useful.
I prefer using MacPorts http://www.macports.org/ for this sort of thing, and in fact there already is a port in MacPorts for Gambit 4.0b22. It's straightforward to turn this into a .pkg, too, with MacPorts, if you so desire: `port pkg gambit-c'. There are other similar package managers, like Fink and Nix, but my experience with MacPorts has been much better.
On Jun 25, 2007, at 1:43 AM, Taylor R Campbell wrote:
I prefer using MacPorts http://www.macports.org/ for this sort of thing, and in fact there already is a port in MacPorts for Gambit 4.0b22. It's straightforward to turn this into a .pkg, too, with MacPorts, if you so desire: `port pkg gambit-c'. There are other similar package managers, like Fink and Nix, but my experience with MacPorts has been much better.
Worth noting in this context that users who don't already have macports installed (I don't, and I install quite a bit of unix software) will have to install that first before they can install gambit. Macports is, somewhat ironically, installed via a .pkg file:
<http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/macports/downloads/ MacPorts-1.4.0/MacPorts-1.4.0-10.4.dmg>
or via make:
<http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/macports/downloads/ MacPorts-1.4.0/MacPorts-1.4.0.tar.gz>
regards,
Ralph
Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D. raffaelcavallaro@mac.com
On Jun 25, 2007, at 12:09 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
Does anyone have experience creating installers for Windows and MacOS X?
For Mac OS X the most `mac-like' way to do installation of more than a single .app directory is with an installer package - a .pkg, .mpkg, or .dist file - which can be created with PackageMaker.app which is installed with the Developer Tools at /Developer/Applications/ Utilities/PackageMaker.app. Unless you're doing something quite involved you can probably get away with a simple .pkg file. When the user double-clicks this package it will be launched by Installer.app which is on every Mac OS X drive, even if the user hasn't installed the developer tools, at /Applications/Utilities. PackageMaker.app is pretty straightforward to use and there is pretty good documentation linked to in PackageMaker's Help menu.
hth,
regards,
Ralph
Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D. raffaelcavallaro@mac.com
Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
On Jun 25, 2007, at 12:09 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
Does anyone have experience creating installers for Windows and MacOS X?
For Mac OS X the most `mac-like' way to do installation of more than a single .app directory is with an installer package - a .pkg, .mpkg, or .dist file
And the only people who get to do that to my computer are Apple. And I hate them for it. They don't even have a useful package uninstaller.
For handling things under OS X, a .dmg file is the way to go. That way, I can install it locally or globally by dragging and dropping, and I don't need to give it privileges that I don't think it needs. And, when I want rid of it, I can just drag it to the trash.
I do *not* install software that uses packages anymore. The only single exception to that is VMWare because it needs to install kernel mode networking hooks.
If I'm just trying something out and it wants to install a package, it goes into the trash.
-a
On Aug 2, 2007, at 8:26 PM, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
For handling things under OS X, a .dmg file is the way to go.
A .dmg file cannot automatically install software to various different directories. That's what .pkg and .mpkg files are for.
regards,
Ralph
Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D. raffaelcavallaro@mac.com
On 8/2/07, Andrew Lentvorski bsder@allcaps.org wrote:
Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
On Jun 25, 2007, at 12:09 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
Does anyone have experience creating installers for Windows and MacOS X?
I hope I am not repeating old information (I did browse the archives quickly) but for installing on Windows I find that the free version of Advanced Installer by Calyphon (http://www.advancedinstaller.com) works great.
If you need help creating a Windows Install package (.MSI) for Gambit, I would be happy to volunteer. I will however not be able to commit to it until September.
All the best, Christopher Diggins
On 3-Aug-07, at 9:11 AM, Christopher Diggins wrote:
I hope I am not repeating old information (I did browse the archives quickly) but for installing on Windows I find that the free version of Advanced Installer by Calyphon (http://www.advancedinstaller.com) works great.
Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried Advanced Installer and I didn't see an obvious way of integrating it in an automatic build process (is there a CLI?). Anyway, on Windows I have chosen NSIS and on MacOS X I use PackageMaker. For PackageMaker, which doesn't include an uninstaller, the installer will install a "gambc- uninstall" script in the PATH which will clean things up.
I know there are other options, but this should be sufficient until someone implements something better. It will be easy to experiment with new installers in the next release of Gambit which includes the automatic packaging scripts.
I would love to add scripts for automatically creating packages for Debian, Gentoo, MacPorts, etc. Can someone look into this?
Marc
Marc Feeley wrote:
Does anyone have experience creating installers for Windows and MacOS X? What are the best free installers?
Personally, when possible, the installer I prefer is the "unzip it anywhere you want and it works" installer. Users then know that the installer isn't going to install a gazillion DLL that can potentially arm their system. (especially if the users are programmers)
For a free one, you could look at NSIS. I have no experience with it but it looks really nice.
Guillaume
<< quote taken from NSIS website http://nsis.sourceforge.net >>
NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a professional open source system to create Windows installers. It is designed to be as small and flexible as possible and is therefore very suitable for internet distribution.
On Jun 25, 2007, at 12:09 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:
Does anyone have experience creating installers for Windows and MacOS X? What are the best free installers?
Marc:
I take your question as a statement that other people know better than you how to create installers for Windows/MacOS; I think you should let those people create the WIndows/MacOS installers, in the same way that you let other people create the Debian and MacPorts installers.
In particular, I'm pointing out that creating installers/packagers for various operating systems is something that people are motivated and have the knowledge to do once the source code is out there. Getting the current source code out there might result in packages for more systems than you've been able to imagine so far.
Brad
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Andrew Lentvorski -
Bradley Lucier -
Christopher Diggins -
Guillaume Cartier -
Marc Feeley -
Raffael Cavallaro -
Taylor R Campbell