[PD-dev] Windows installer for Pd

[Roman Haefeli]

On Wed, 2015-11-11 at 09:07 +0100, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
> On 2015-11-10 21:54, Roman Haefeli wrote:
> > 
> > The not so nice part about NSIS is that you have to list every single
> > file of your source packet explicitly and tell it where to install.
> > Since it is inconvenient to touch that script whenever a new version is
> > released, I added a bash script that creates the file list automatically
> > for a given Pd-for-Windows folder.
> 
> looking at my NSIS installer for Gem [1], it seems that you can use
> wildcards for adding files.

Yes, but when using wildcards the nsi-script still relies on the
directory layout not to change. Since we want to actually _move_ the Pd
directory as is to its destination (without changing its layout), it
seemed more reasonable to me to build the file list on the fly without
assuming a directory layout. 
 
> iirc, the main problem with this is, that for the *uninstaller* you need
> to enumerate the files as well (again you can use wildcards, but then
> you risk deleting unrelated files)

Yes, one more reason to build the list of files dynamically.

> > Once you have Wine and NSIS installed, it's really only a matter of
> > running the included bash script to create an updated Pd installer. I
> > only tried it on Linux, but if you have bash on Windows, it should work
> > there as well.
> 
> wine? shouldn't that only be needed to *test* the installer?

You're right. I could have built makensis (the compiler) on Linux. It
seemed easier to me to download their pre-compiled Windows package. If
you're going to cross-compile Pd for Windows the Miller way, it's likely
you have installed Wine anyway. That is the setup I had in mind. 

> anyhow, just a quick warning: i do remember having problems with the
> linux builds of NSIS: the resulting installers worked great but had the
> side-effect of "somehow" wrecking the target system in subtle ways.
> (IIRC after running the installer, people stopped being able to use M$
> outlook and weird things like that; while i never found out the actual
> cause of the problem, i was able to confirm that problems started when
> using the installer built on my Debian system and that they did not
> start when using the installer built on a W32 system (using the same
> input)).

Thanks for sharing those experiences! I haven't tried myself to create
an installer with a Linux build of makensis and your experiences do not
exactly sound encouraging. I tested the resulting installer under Wine,
Windows XP (VirtualBox) and Windows 7 (VirtualBox). I didn't run into
the problems you described, but of course I wasn't testing much other
software after installing. This kind of issues is really hard to test
for preemptively.

I tested the following after installing :
 * Pd runs correctly
 * Pd files have to correct icon
 * Pd files are opened with Pd when double-clicked

I tested the following after uninstalling:
 * The uninstaller can be executed
 * The uninstaller completely removes Pd from %ProgramFiles%
 * The uninstaller completely removes the start menu entries
 * Any entries to the registry added by the installer are removed

If there are more things to be tested on a Windows machine I did not
think about, please let me know. To my knowledge, the installer only
touches %ProgramFiles%, the start menu, and the registry.

Roman




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