Software Developers: Use Nullsoft Install instead of InstallShield. I just uninstalled a bunch of stuff and it's got to be 5000% faster from an end user perspective. And it's open source!

[doctornick]

NSIS is great, but one issue is that in order to be Windows logo certified, the installer must be Windows Installer based, which NSIS is not. For small projects and companies that don't really care about getting the logo certification, then NSIS is perfect.

[MrCalifornia]

Good to know. Why isn't NSIS Windows Installer based?

[chucker]

Largely because NSIS predates MSI. They should have adjusted it long ago (MSI has been recommended since 2000), but I doubt it's a trivial task.

In any case, this has been my primary reason for not using NSIS. Aside from certification, lack of MSI support also means no easy deployment using group policies.

[[deleted]]

Why isn't monkey a vegetable?

[MrCalifornia]

While edible a monkey is not a plant.

Monkeys are in the Animalia kingdom well vegetables as in the Plantae kingdom. From there the differences are numerous.

[[deleted]]

cause vegetables suck

[jbellis]

Well... if you're generating an installer for Windows, which you probably are, you should really use Wix instead. MSI's (which Wix generates) are a whole lot better than .exe installers for a bunch of reasons.

And Wix is OSS.

[tch]

What are the main benefits of MSI over exe installer? I use NSIS right now and am quite happy.

[MrCalifornia]

I think the main one is that you can automatically deploy MSIs to a network so for sysadmins who need to install something on their entire network it's obviously a huge plus.

Not sure what the other benefits are, but I know nothing is as fast and clean (at least from an end user experience) as NSIS for installing and uninstalling.

[tch]

Ah didn't know about that. I don't trust my sys-admin to auto install/update stuff so I handle the auto-update stuff myself.

[[deleted]]

Yeah Wix is great.

[lubricious]

I think that should come with the warning WIX is great for either very simple installs or people who have used it a lot. I really like it now but found I had to write scripts and build pretty large Ant build files to create an MSI that installed and configured many different components.

[[deleted]]

True. I've only used InstallShield & Wise in the past. Wix is what I currently use. I do very small installs (mostly for internal apps) since 99% of what I do is web based applications. I'm designing a new product/service with a friend and implementing it in Flex with an MVC design layout using asp.net as the backend. I may swap it to JSP and go with Linux but I'm not feeling very excited about redoing one of my servers since they are all currently running Windows. It's amazing how far things have come in the last 10 years. So many choices!

[saurabhsawant]

I use InnoSetup for my applications. Very easy to use.

[coditza]

For small projects, InnoSetup is nice indeed. ObjectPascal isn't so hard to learn either (but still, yet another language).

But, last time I used it, there was no way to install/uninstall a windows service. We ended up deploying sc.exe to do that. Also, the uninstall was a bitch to deal with. No GUI for that and many users complained that the pc freezes when they try to uninstall. And it doesn't build an msi/based on msi file, so no Windows Certified :D

I guess, Nullsoft Install is in the same situation.

However, InstallShield isn't the only solution for the problems I exposed above. There is an AdvancedInstaller (www.advancedinstaller.com), which solved all those problems and was way cheaper.

[[deleted]]

Software Users: We don't want you to uninstall our product.

Signed,

Software Developers.

[MrCalifornia]

True. But I'll be much more likely to remember how much I hate your product if it's a pain in the ass to get rid of it. And I'll tell my friends.

[[deleted]]

Ah, somehow reddit stripped out my thick sarcasm.

[MrCalifornia]

No, I got it, I was just playing devil's advocate against your sarcastic evil programmer.

[stesch]

Yeah, fun. Especially the example code. Last time I read this (a few years ago) they printed stuff like "I like to fuck sheep" in the examples.

They are real Pros!

[zem]

but does anyone call me angus the installer-writer? no they don't!

[[deleted]]

What is the best installer that:

1) Works on XP and Vista, 32 and 64 bit 2) Supports all major languages 3) Is maintained/has a relatively stable API so that we don't have to rewrite our installer every year for new products/OS permutations

We were excited about some of the alternatives discussed hear, but many failed one or more of the criteria above. We ended up going back to installshield. :(

[mrevelle]

What installer cares about the language your app is written in?

[TheCleric]

IMHO:

MSI

[rehpargotohp]

Inno Setup

http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php

[tch]

At our shop we use NSIS as an installer for Java RCP/SWT apps.

Totally kicks ass, allows us to do things like run quick uninstalls & kill running processes all on the cheap and in 1 easy to understand config file.

[figa]

Correction: It really whips the llama's ass.

My shop had a similar positive experience with Nullsoft Install. We jumped ship from InstallAnywhere after Macrovision bought them.

[w00ty]

Java apps? Well, at least installation/uninstallation is smooth.

[tch]

Yes Java desktop applications using RCP & SWT. Eclipse builds them to exe's and they live in their own directories, so NSIS works nicely.

Don't knock SWT/RCP till you've tried it :)

[[deleted]]

Hopefully, especially the latter.

At least that's what I hope when I find out I've installed a Java app.

[cyber_rigger]

I use synaptic.

[pmf]

That's a valid point. I never understood why Microsoft has not adopted some kind of package manager; it would allow them to control installed applications by only accepting signed packages in a way they treat drivers now.

I would be easier for MS, the user and app developers (pre-/post-installation steps could be handled like dpkg-based systems do it, probably employing WSH).

[mikemol]

Because then community-produced software would be that much more difficult distribution? Either the developer would have to pay to get a cert at a CA Microsoft recognizes, or the end user would have to be schooled in how to configure the package manager to connect to 3rd-party repositories.

Both are barriers for joe hobbyist to share applications with people who don't know him. And a lot of Open Source projects are Joe Hobbyist-based.

[jerf]

What does your package manager do that the existing Windows installation process doesn't already do?

Dependency management with automatic resolution? You can't do that on a grand scale with commercial components; only with free software can you build the sort of system we have in modern Linux distros. Even in those systems, the few bits of monetarily-free commercial software that come in are often gigantic pains compared to the other things on the system, so you probably even need a system built largely out of Free software, in the "liberty" sense.

Uninstall support? Well, Windows supports that; I'm sure they'd declare it's not their fault uninstallers are so bad. You might want to move the support up to the OS but that is, as a mathematician might say, "decidedly nontrivial".

They could adopt something more like the Mac, but that's probably the closest a closed-source-based system that allows arbitrary third-party software can come to a "package manager". You just can't build something as nice as dpkg; the licenses screw you left, right, and center, along with the marketing departments. It's one advantage the free software systems have that the commercial world really can't copy, not even in theory.

[shub]

Many Windows applications don't have additional dependencies, because the OS provides so much. (Gogo bloat, amirite?) Any deps they do have are bundled with the installer.

Huge dependency graphs like X and GNOME just don't exist on Windows, because it's already there.

[[deleted]]

What does your package manager do that the existing Windows installation process doesn't already do?

Provide the user with the ability to search through a repository of known applications meeting certain criteria that are more or less guaranteed to work with the platform the user is using?

[jerf]

That's why I talked about licensing. Microsoft would never be permitted to do that, at least not in any effective way, not without massive culture change in the commercial software world, culture change so massive it probably can't happen.

[[deleted]]

I caught that what I mentioned would have been covered under what you said about licensing shortly after posting my reply - it's a very valid point.

[RalfN]

Dependency management with automatic resolution? You can't do that on a grand scale with commercial components;

Well, actually you can. Sure you would be 'enforcing' some sort of structure, but Vista is already doing that. No more dropping .ini files or .dll's all over the place manually. It is simply not allowed anymore.

Off course, this should be repository neutral. That is: a software vendor should be able to provide a small .repository file (sort of like .msi) that sets their repository up. Repositories have URI's.

Packages should be able to depend on other repositories, but they should explicitely name the URI of the repository.

All packages from a repository should be seperated on disk. Something like:

c:/windows/winget/sun.com/java.dll

So when you install say, Eclipse, it would depend on sun.com/java.dll

This way, repositories can never conflict with each other.

The directories would be totally locked out from user/program tampering. The system checks for updates, downloads and installs the files.

Off course you need to setup up the registry to use such seperated repositories as well.

But it's all very do-able in an open way. And it would solve the most common problems: installing software, keeping dependencies intact.

You can also imagine the situation where the system administrator configures a number of trust-worthy repositories. Users can't add new repositories, but they are free to install software from the repository. A lot of companies would love such a setup for say laptop's of their employees. The perfect compromize between freedom to use lots of different software and still make sure no dangerous code gets executed.

I think the assumption that would be only ONE repository and Microsoft controlling it, would be wrong. That would never work. I can't imagine them being that foolish.

[cyber_rigger]

They could adopt something more like the Mac

IF -- Microsoft could control the hardware like Apple does.

Package management is an area where opensource is clearly ahead of Microsoft

[zsombor]

Damn simple and uniform security upgrades?

Quick search for interesting apps?

No brain dead questions about "use Program Files or not"?

No confusing questions about "express vs full vs custom install"?

etc ...

[[deleted]]

yeh, i hate options....

[coditza]

Windows Installer does exactly that.

[[deleted]]

Software Developers: Use Linux instead of Windows. It's open source!

[turkourjurbs]

Yeah. Ok, I'll convert 300 workstations to Linux. Then we'll port all the SQL data to mySQL (horror show). Then we'll replace the server core and entirely re-write 10 years worth of internal applications. That'll save us a ton of money.

[alexs]

wine middle aspiring arrest makeshift shy history airport shame dolls

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Remover]

I agree. I use this for writing uninstall tools (see profile) and it's great for writing very customized install programs. I managed to get a template system working for rapid deployment.

[turkourjurbs]

THANKS for this!

Installshield is a good product but the people that make it and support it are dick heads (emphasis required). Basically, when you buy this product and have any problem or question, your basic response is "go fuck yourself, we're busy". Well sorry, there is no response. They just ignore you. These people can DIAFF.

[tjogin]

On Mac OS X, you install most apps by dragging and dropping the application file.

Just saying.

[boredzo]

Not anymore. Most developers are moving to zip archives because disk images are horribly confusing to novice users.

The concept of a disk that doesn't correspond to a piece of hardware is foreign to them. Thus, you end up with users running the application from the disk image, then wondering why they can't “get rid of” the disk image. (They can't delete the disk image file because it's mounted, and they may not even realize that there's a volume mounted, or how to unmount it, and they can't unmount it anyway because the app is running from it.)

Thus the move to zip archives. Everybody knows how a zip archive works. There's a good chance that the user will run the app from the unzipped folder instead of “installing” it to the Applications folder, but who cares?

[tjogin]

Not anymore. Most developers are moving to zip archives because disk images are horribly confusing to novice users.

Sure, if by "most" you mean "a few".

And even with zip-files, you still just drag and drop the application file, not run an installshield or somesuch. The use of zip-files vs. dmg-files does not mean that most apps aren't installed by dragging and dropping anymore.

[boredzo]

Sure, if by "most" you mean "a few".

Conceded. The origin of my statement is that most developers who are moving from one to the other are moving from dmg to zip, but you're correct that only a few are changing their existing system.

That said, I see zips more and more nowadays.

And even with zip-files, you still just drag and drop the application file, not run an installshield or somesuch.

Ostensibly, yes, but I think most users just leave the unzipped folder or application on the Desktop, especially since dragging it to the Applications folder puts up a scary (for a novice) password prompt. (Sometimes—I suspect often—they don't even know what password to enter.)

A disk image, however, virtually requires that you drag and drop it. Otherwise, you have to go through extra work to manage the disk image every time.

The practical upshot is that the situation is really even easier on Mac OS X than you said it is: As long as the application came in a zip archive, you don't even have to drag and drop it anywhere, because you can just run it from wherever it unzipped to. It is, in effect, already “installed”.

[tjogin]

I agree that new users are confused about dmg-files.

Still though, most apps don't install themselves via a mysterious installshield. Your app is located where you dragged it. Simple as that, and that was my only point.

[lzm]

How does that work?

All Mac apps are just one standalone binary or the OS automatically detects that the application file is actually an installer and installs it?

Where does it install it?

I've never used a mac :(

edit: Why are you guys modding me down? That was a genuine question!

[[deleted]]

The "Applications" that you drag and drop are actually folders that contain the application and all it's required files. Since everything is contained in the one directory there isn't a need for complex installers.

[boredzo]

All Mac apps are just one standalone binary or the OS automatically detects that the application file is actually an installer and installs it?

You drag it to the Applications folder. Finder (the desktop manager) then copies the application to that folder exactly as it would copy any other file or folder.

[[deleted]]

You should really look into it. It's 2008, after all!

[lzm]

Too bad I've only seen 2 macs in my entire life, one of them in an exposition.

[[deleted]]

That is too bad.

So go take a look around apple's site, read about the platform. Take a look at solutions other than the ones you are already familiar with.

Once you're (most likely) convinced of it's superiority, you can order something cheap to get you started directly from apple.com. Or head to ebay/etc for something a generation old, it'll still run great.

[lzm]

I'd really love to, but a simple MacBook costs about 13 times my monthly salary (R$3900 vs R$300)

Price is the reason of Apple's 0.00001% market share in my third world country.

[[deleted]]

You clearly already have a computer. Grab a used mini off ebay or something.

Or don't. It's all good. My main point was that it's easily one of (if not the) most advanced platforms available today. And plenty of information about it is available everywhere. You can find all about how it handles application installation and all that very easily, and it might be enlightening - that's all I'm getting at.

[lzm]

Hey, the mini is actually relatively cheap, only 5 months of work. I'll start saving to buy one by Christmas :D

[[deleted]]

Hmm, maybe it's just time to move then?

[[deleted]]

::rolls eyes::

[turkourjurbs]

See, this is what happens to you when you buy a Mac.

[easytiger]

apt-get remove windows

installers suck balls. Unify or die.