Anybody here happen to know anything about NSIS?

I was under the impression that NSIS is supposed to make building an 
installer "easy" - but this is manifestly not the case. The 
documentation is terse and unhelpful, the examples are opaque and don't 
cover what I'm actually trying to do, and it's just extremely hard to 
work out how to do anything.

The installation scripting language is extremely low-level; I'm 
basically having to resort to writing a program in a high-level language 
to autogenerate the NSIS script, because it's too painful to write by hand.

I especially love the way that if you say "install every file that 
matches *.txt", it keeps the directory structure, but it you say 
"install the file doc\v21\readme.txt", it loses the directory structure. 
Really ****ing helpful, that.

I did have a look at MSI, but that's even harder, with even more 
arbitrary limitations.

Man, when I started out yesterday, I thought I was trying to do 
something really easy. I guess not!

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Invisible wrote:
> Anybody here happen to know anything about NSIS?

So apparently that's a "no" then.

> I was under the impression that NSIS is supposed to make building an 
> installer "easy" - but this is manifestly not the case. The 
> documentation is terse and unhelpful, the examples are opaque and don't 
> cover what I'm actually trying to do, and it's just extremely hard to 
> work out how to do anything.

Ah yes, wonderful documentation. Currently I'm trying to figure out how 
to make NSIS actually *react* to errors, rather than blindly ignore 
them. You would think that a product designed specifically for the 
purpose of making complex installers would support you by making this 
kind of thing drop-dead easy... but no. Apparently you have to script it 
like you're writing psuedo-assumbly language. Yuck!!

> Man, when I started out yesterday, I thought I was trying to do 
> something really easy. I guess not!

Well, I have at least got to the point where the installer works when 
everything goes according to plan. Trouble is, if there's a problem, the 
installer merrily continues as if nothing's wrong. Not very graceful!

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Le 23/03/2010 11:43, Invisible nous fit lire :
> Invisible wrote:
>> Anybody here happen to know anything about NSIS?
> 
> So apparently that's a "no" then.
> 

I had enough troubles with *.inf file with signed *.sys & *.cat to just
install a driver (on the 3 supported cpu) to have learned one thing:

Stay away from Microsoft if you can! If not, keep it very VERY very
basic. And double + triple checks before delivering... twice!

Debian installation is on the other hand a real pleasure for dedicated
binaries.
(But I have yet to install from sources for multi-architecture)

> Well, I have at least got to the point where the installer works when
> everything goes according to plan. Trouble is, if there's a problem, the
> installer merrily continues as if nothing's wrong. Not very graceful!

Even with a basic *.inf, I ended up installing a x386 driver on a amd64
system... no complains, until the reboot where the service was not
started... only clue was file size.
Installing a corrupted (but signed while clean) file ? No complains
either, you could think they check the signature at installation time,
at least... no!

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Le_Forgeron wrote:

> I had enough troubles with *.inf file with signed *.sys & *.cat to just
> install a driver (on the 3 supported cpu) to have learned one thing:
> 
> Stay away from Microsoft if you can! If not, keep it very VERY very
> basic. And double + triple checks before delivering... twice!
> 
> Debian installation is on the other hand a real pleasure for dedicated
> binaries.
> (But I have yet to install from sources for multi-architecture)

And yet, I can get Windows to work, but Debian consistently frustrates 
my attempts to make it do what I want.

(E.g., do a default install of Debian. Click the button marked "change 
screen resolution". In the window that comes up, the slider to change 
resolution is disabled. Yeah, that's really helpful.)

>> Well, I have at least got to the point where the installer works when
>> everything goes according to plan. Trouble is, if there's a problem, the
>> installer merrily continues as if nothing's wrong. Not very graceful!
> 
> Even with a basic *.inf, I ended up installing a x386 driver on a amd64
> system... no complains, until the reboot where the service was not
> started... only clue was file size.
> Installing a corrupted (but signed while clean) file ? No complains
> either, you could think they check the signature at installation time,
> at least... no!

I wouldn't mind, but NSIS is touted as this great free tool to take the 
hassle out of building complex installers. And yet, most of the time the 
"hassle" is figuring out how to get around the limitations of NSIS. Even 
something as trivial as finding out which of three possible files exists 
is stupidly complex!

As I say, I did look at making an MSI file, but that is apparently 
drastically more complex still. (And it's even less-well documented. I 
can find the pages that tell you all about how fantastic MSI is, but not 
the pages they tell you HOW TO MAKE ONE!)

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> (E.g., do a default install of Debian. Click the button marked "change 
> screen resolution". In the window that comes up, the slider to change 
> resolution is disabled. Yeah, that's really helpful.)

This was the same in Windows before XP.  I can't remember the number of 
times I had to go looking for graphics card drivers while not being able to 
change out of 640x480x8bit resolution...

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scott wrote:
>> (E.g., do a default install of Debian. Click the button marked "change 
>> screen resolution". In the window that comes up, the slider to change 
>> resolution is disabled. Yeah, that's really helpful.)
> 
> This was the same in Windows before XP.  I can't remember the number of 
> times I had to go looking for graphics card drivers while not being able 
> to change out of 640x480x8bit resolution...

If you don't have the necessary driver installed, it is impossible to 
drive the card at a higher resolution.

If Debian wasn't finding the correct driver and defaulting to some 
horribly low resolution, I could understand that.

However, the *actual* problem is that Debian is defaulting to a 
resolution larger than my monitor, and I'd like to *reduce* it to, say, 
1024x768 or something. But nooo...

As petty as it sounds, this is the main reason I'm using OpenSUSE. It 
defaults to a sane resolution, and it seems to somehow "know" it's 
running under VMware, so things like mouse integration work out of the box.

(I tried installing VMware tools on Debian, but it can't compile it 
because there's no compiler. So I installed the compiler, but then it 
complained that I don't have the kernel headers. So I installed the 
kernel headers. And then it complained that the kernel was compiled with 
a different compiler than the one I installed. So I looked for the 
version it's asking for... and it's not listed in the Debian package 
database. At this point, I gave up in utter frustration.)

It's a pitty really - Debian starts up much faster than OpenSUSE. (Not 
that "faster" is the same as "fast", mind you...)

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On 3/24/2010 4:28 AM, Invisible wrote:
> As I say, I did look at making an MSI file, but that is apparently
> drastically more complex still. (And it's even less-well documented. I
> can find the pages that tell you all about how fantastic MSI is, but not
> the pages they tell you HOW TO MAKE ONE!)

This is SOP. Please refer to articles 34234-5434 and 52334-235, where we 
explain why this is a wonderful way to document things and became SOP, 
but not how it actually works. lol

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models, 
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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Invisible wrote:
> As I say, I did look at making an MSI file, but that is apparently 
> drastically more complex still. 

You were the one asking about the benefits of using an IDE, yes?  ;-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Yes, we're traveling togeher,
   but to different destinations.

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Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> As I say, I did look at making an MSI file, but that is apparently 
>> drastically more complex still. 
> 
> You were the one asking about the benefits of using an IDE, yes?  ;-)

Heh, there are IDEs that can do *that*?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>>> As I say, I did look at making an MSI file, but that is apparently 
>>> drastically more complex still.
>>
>> You were the one asking about the benefits of using an IDE, yes?  ;-)
>
> Heh, there are IDEs that can do *that*?

I don't know anything about the detail of installers or how they work, I 
just click "Publish" in Visual Studio and tell it where to put the 
installer.  You can also tick boxes for which prerequisites your installer 
also checks for and installs (eg the .net framework, a certain version of 
Windows Installer, XNA framework, various SQL servers, etc) - this seems to 
be intelligently correct by default though...

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