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Theo Gottwald * wrote on 25 Jul 2003 12:46 Uhr:
> Hi Soeren,
>
> Wasn't meant as critics, was meant as a general statement, comparing
> diffrent methods of installations.
>
> See
> http://groups.google.de/groups?q=MSI+repackaging+support&hl=de&lr=&
> ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=OIEdkOREAHA.60%40cppssbbsa04&rnum=2
Sorry, won't work (the message ID OIEdkOREAHA.60%40cppssbbsa04 won't be
accepted).
> I am quite shure, in your special case what you did is what was the
> best. Especially as you solved your problem.
Thanks. The reason I opt for MSI repackaging is that once the package is
tested and fine, you can easily deploy it over >50 clients without a
software besides W2K Server (which we need running anyway).
Installing using Pov-Ray's Wise Installer simply didn't seem feasible
for me, especially because that's not at all what we're doing with other
software either.
>> I'd like to know what Network Rendering has to do with automatically
> deploying an application over a network ...
> I can tell that to you :-). Before you can render in a network you
> need to install POV-Ray on each of those machines. And why do that
> "manually" if its sooo easy done automatically? However you may still
> need a way to bring those files on all the PC's.
So, it's an automated installation? Like a snapshot or something?
>>, btw. What you're probably doing is just letting the Wise Installer
>>run in
> silent mode.
> To be honest I did never even know that this would work. maybe I don't
> needed that ever.
> Going away from POV-Ray, my statement was more general saying "How can
> anyone be shure that a "repacked file " Will work under all
> circumstances?" (see Link at top).
Since the link won't work for me, I suppose you mean an argument that
goes along the lines of this:
-----
Repackaging
There are several tools around which can take a "snapshot" of a
machine's state before and after a manual installation, compute the
differences between the states, and bundle them up as an "installer".
The Wise product line provides good support for this, and Microsoft's
free tool (recently updated) provides bad support for it.
The main problem with this approach is that it fundamentally cannot work
reliably. Installers can vary their behavior depending on the exact
initial state of the machine, such as the OS version or the presence/
absence of other installed software. So the repackaged installer will
almost never do exactly the same thing that a fresh installation would,
unless the target machine is completely identical to the original
machine.
In addition, for every new release of an application, you will need to
repackage it again. And there are other disadvantages which even
Microsoft recognizes.
For these reasons, I think repackaging is a very bad idea and I advise
against it.
-----
( From <http://unattended.sourceforge.net/installers.html> )
> Thats not a question "How good" you can use all those repackaging-
> tools, the question is just "How good can you know what needs to be
> done while the installation".
I'm aware of that problem; however, I have yet to run into any real
trouble regarding that. POV-Ray is open-source anyway, so we're pretty
much in control of what it *might* do, right? The only huge software
package that is *not* open-source and that we use regularly (since the
teachers won't adapt to OpenOffice.org) is MS Office - well, and that
one *is* available as MSIs already (has been since version 2000 / 9.x),
so we don't need repackaging in that case. :-)
It's school computers. We don't need a lot of software; nothing
particularly complicated. I try to use simple and / or free software
whenever I can - 7-zip instead of WinZip or WinRAR, IrfanView instead of
ACDSee, MediaPlayer Classic (MPC) instead of RealPlayer, QuickTime or
Windows Media Player.
So what I'm doing is spend at least a day analyzing on at least two
different machines what a program's installer does, and then I let a
software like Wise Package Studio build an MSI of that progress. And
that would have worked just fine with POV-Ray if only there hadn't been
that weird wrong entry. Anyways.
> I saw those problems Chris told you
> about and thought the article I read in the newsgroup.
>
> It wasn't personal but I am just working with these installation
> things, so I saw a chance to produce myself a bit :-))).
I'm sorry that I might have sounded annoyed. I was just frustrated that
I couldn't find what's wrong. Anyway, as said, I actually *did* now -
the user we've been testing it on had a wrong "Home" entry in the POV-
Ray HKCU tree structure. *Why* is another question, but do I wanna know? ;-)
> By the way ... http://www.it-berater.org/download/down.pl?file=31 (
> Hope you have XP Prof. somewhere :-). Try this one and tell me :-)
> which installer we used in silent mode.
I'm sorry, but I'm on a trip to Canada right now, and only have Mac OS X
here. I'll have a chance to give it a try in two weeks.
Thanks again and see you around,
--
<http://www.chucker.rasdi.net>
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