Friday Progress Report on Installer
- Posted by Travis Beaty <travisbeaty at arn.net> May 11, 2001
- 473 views
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_000E_01C0DA05.36C8E100 charset="Windows-1252" Howdy y'all! This is mainly just a progress report to let you all know how work is progressing with the Windows Installer. The packager (a DOS app) has been built. This packager allows me to place all the needed files into one eds file, which will be distributed with the installation program, either as one large file, or cut into three floppy-disk sized chunks. I am currently working on the installation program itself now, specifically the various forms and code needed to get necessary information from the user, such as where to put the Euphoria folder, which options they want, and so on. I am hopeful that I'll complete the information gathering section of the program by the end of the weekend, and begin tackling the act of installing and adjusting the user's autoexec.bat file next week. As far as the "optional equipment" is concerned, I have gotten permission from everyone to include their libraries, with the exception of Mr. White, and CS:EE. I attempted to reach him at the email address given in the documentation (cyrek at bigfoot.com) last Friday, but had no luck. If you happen to be reading the list, Mr. White, please contact me privately. Although the license says that re-distribution is allowed, I'd like specific permission as this is going to be a *major* redistribution of your code. I have not seen him on the list in a while, and I fear that CS:EE might be orphanware, which would be a Very Sad Thing. Some of things which I'd like to have the installer do is ... 1. Associate Euphoria files with ex.exe and exw.exe. There are keys for this in the Registry, I believe, but messing with the Registry makes me rather nervous. Well, okay, it gives me shivers. 2. Create shortcuts for the Euphoria documentation and editors. I've looked in win32.hlp, and found no guidelines for doing this using Windows API. I'll continue researching this. If someone out there already knows how, please let me know! Also, I should say that the creation of shortcuts will be *completely* optional. Nothing irritates me more than when an application installs a bajillion shortcuts all over my system. The installer, if allowed, will install any shortcuts in one folder only. On the subject of an Internet installation, I've decided that at this point, I'll make the installer an non-Internet application. **However,** subsequent versions will have this capability. It was suggested that Mr. Craig write a CGI "front-end" to the installer, which would allow the user to pull the optional libraries right off the archive pages. While it is up to him to agree or not agree to such an arrangement, this would saddle him with the responsibility of making sure that packages packaged, updating the code as necessary, and basically making him responsible for half of the installation program. The way I see it, if that was what he wanted, he'd have already built a Windows installer himself. Basically, imho, such a setup would distract him from his work with the translator and Euphoria 2.3, so I guess we ought to just let him do what he does best: produce and improve a wonderful programming language! Finally, please find attached a screenshot of the Installer. I shrank it down to 3/4 size so that the size of the attachment, hopefully, doesn't make anyone mad. If it does, tell me *nicely,* and I'll never, ever, do that again. -- Travis -- ------=_NextPart_000_000E_01C0DA05.36C8E100 Content-Type: image/jpeg; name="euinstall.jpg" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64