Re: ODBC Snapshot Installer (for Dave Page)

Hi Dave,

You can do all that stuff with Inno as well and with much more
productivity, also Inno is used by many large open source projects as
their installer of choice on windows.
Inno also supports C style includes so you can have chunks of your
installer script reused.
One example is the Firebird Database project (I know it's the competition
but it's one of the higher profiles ones I know of)
I tried the decompiler and you end up with a huge barely readable XML
file(hundreds of lines), it's not intuitive at all.
MSI is fine when you use it with Wise and they give you a nice
interface/IDE.

What do other people on this list think? Should we be supporting MS by
using their installer technology?

From what I have seen MSI is NOT superior to Inno, just because it's MS
own propriatary (supported) solution does not mean it's the best.

So I guess if you are totally against it I withdraw my offer :-(

Tony Caduto
Senior Programmer/Analyst
M&I Trust and Investment Management

"Dave Page" <dpage(at)vale-housing(dot)co(dot)uk>
10/07/2004 03:02 PM

To
<anthony(dot)caduto(at)micorp(dot)com>, <pgsql-odbc(at)postgresql(dot)org>
cc

Subject
RE: [ODBC] ODBC Snapshot Installer (for Dave Page)

From: pgsql-odbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
[mailto:pgsql-odbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of
anthony(dot)caduto(at)micorp(dot)com
Sent: 06 October 2004 16:59
To: pgsql-odbc(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: [ODBC] ODBC Snapshot Installer (for Dave Page)

Dave,
I have successfully created a ODBC installer and it looks almost identical
to the current MSI one.
I looked at the M$ stuff you mentioned and the learning curve is pretty
high.
I created this one with Inno Setup 5 and it only took a few minutes and is
much easier to use than MSI or that xml msi stuff

Like I said, I would be willing to take over creating the installer if you
don't mind switching to Inno Setup.

I could also do the setup for PGAdmin III :-)

Hi Tony,

Thanks, however as I said we intentionally use MSI based setup because of
the benefits of features such as merge modules, custom actions and the
fact that it's Microsoft's supported installation technique. I realise
that you dislike supporting them, but there's little sense avoiding using
their tools when targeting their platform - especially when they do make
them Open Source.

Feel free to try again with Wix if you like - I think I mentioned that it
has a decompiler, so porting the installer MSM and then it's MSI files
should simply be a case of running the decompiler on each of 2 existing
files, and doing a little cleaning work.

Regards, Dave.