Bill Baxter wrote:

> My 2 cents is that InnoSetup is the best [...]
> NSIS's way is more general, but more tedious.

It's tedious alright, but it is also simple to
generate with wizards or programs and to edit ?

A cool thing about MinGW32 and NSIS is that they
do not require a Windows OS in order to build...
And last time I looked at InnoSetup, the overhead
was like ten times the size of the NSIS overhead.

--anders

Bill Baxter wrote:
> NSIS is best if you need very specialized custom behavior like an internet-aware installer or something like that.

Well, that would be perfect for an installer that downloads DMD!

(Although I'd still ask for Walter's permission first.)

A distro that contains all except DMD itself would then be a viable alternative.

Anders F Björklund wrote:
> We have RPMs for RedHat/Fedora, DEBs for Debian/Ubuntu, an ebuild for
> Gentoo, and I think there is a port for FreeBSD somewhere as well...
> 
> They will even handle installing the old "compat" libstdc++.so it needs,
> upgrade the configuration and handle upgrades + all such other niceties.

Excellent!!

We should figure out a way to get more publicity for them.

...

> There are two such GDC "distros", for Mac and Win, maybe one for Linux.
> But there isn't very much bundled except the D compiler at the moment.
> 
> Future releases will feature more import modules and more documentation,
> this is something that has been planned all along. Just not completed.

A very good start!

Georg Wrede wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
> 
>> NSIS is best if you need very specialized custom behavior like an internet-aware installer or something like that.
> 
> 
> Well, that would be perfect for an installer that downloads DMD!
> 
> (Although I'd still ask for Walter's permission first.)
> 
> A distro that contains all except DMD itself would then be a viable alternative.

Yeh, if it seems even remotely possible you'd like to go in that direction (an installer with a lot of smarts) then starting with NSIS makes sense.

Also I think Anders you are right about file sizes.  I do recall small sizes being a major point of NSIS.  I think the Innosetup installers basically include all the functionality InnoSetup is capable of, whether or not you are using it.  Whereas with NSIS, it only compiles in the features you're really using.

Yes you can do some automation, writing scripts to generate things like the file install and uninstall lists.  I wrote some Python scripts like that for my NSIS installer.  It's just extra work you have to do that isn't necssary with InnoSetup.

Not sure what platform issues there are.  I thought both Inno and NSIS were pretty solidly in the Windows only camp.

--bb

Bill Baxter wrote:

> Not sure what platform issues there are.  I thought both Inno and NSIS were pretty solidly in the Windows only camp.

I meant that I can use my Linux machine to make a Windows installer...

As for actually running the installer, then you are totally correct :-)

--anders