FreeOrion

Hi.

The first draft of the Windows Installer is finished and I just want to hear your thoughts. It isn't CVSed yet, but I will do it in the weekend.

Here is a list of things I want to hear your opinion:

• The installer starts with displaying the licence (GPL), and afterwards shows the "welcome"-screen. Personally, I find this method more logical; are there any objections to this?
• The binaries are unstripped (contain debugging symbol) to make bug-reporting and -finding easier. However, this blows up the installer to 12 Megs (instead of 5) and takes 160 Megs of diskspace (instead of 20, IIRC). These are the things I think of:
  1. Make 2 installers, on 5MB without and one 11MB with debugging symbols
  2. Let the installer invoke mingw's strip, if the user wanted to, shrinking the needed diskspace for the installed files
  3. Pack the stripped executables, and let the installer download the debugging symbols via web, if wanted by the user
  Personally, I strongly prefer Method #2, however, this requires that the executables are compiled with GCC. As I see no good reason for using MSVC, I think this should be no problem.
• Should the source be included, or should the installer just install a link to the sourceforge page?

Any thoughts? Flames?

We should distribute this without any debugging symbols. This should be targetted at end-users, who will almost certainly not benefit from being able to examine a problem as it happens.

Those of us who can benefit from looking at the execution in a debugger can just build it from the sources as usual.

As for the source, we need to link to it, but I don't think it will be necessary to include it directly.

Agreed. The reason I want debugging symbols is that the program can output more useful information if a bug/crash occurs.
Instead of "caused a segfault at 0x4281021" it could provide a stack backtrace including function names, which, IMHO could help.

For now, I will go without debugging symbols.

I have recently heard of some open source windows installers which might be worth considering for FreeOrion. One is called "Inno Setup",
http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php

The other is called "Installbase"
http://installbase.sourceforge.net/main.shtml

NSIS is also open source and more flexible than InnoSetup (and smaller as well)

Edit: I just noticed that Installbase seems to be cross-platform. I'll check it out. Thanks for the link

(BTW: I still prefer debian/rpm packages for Linux systems)

Just FYI, The installer is ready, I already posted it on fo-programmers some days ago; the forums were down at that moment.

However: the "full" installer is here
http://freeorion.sourceforge.net/FreeOr ... p-demo.exe (~ 8,5 MB)

For those of you without a big line, the same installer without any files can be downloaded from here:
http://freeorion.sourceforge.net/FreeOr ... -dummy.exe (< 100 KB)

Please make some tests, e.g. running as non-admin on XP, installing on W98, using control center/software to deinstall or the startmenu one

So wait, is that like the completed 0.1 alpha, or jus thr installler with some random files, or what?

It's the near completed 0.1.

Oh ok thanks Tyreth.

Ok worked fine on my windows XP Home edition not sure why but the default install dir. was simply C/Freeorion but when I installed it on my XP Professional the default was C:/Program files/FreeOrion. This of course is no big deal with the browse button because I never install things the default way. The uninstall seemed to work fine also. I then created a test account without admin. rights on the XP professional ran the program I was greeted with comment that without Admin. rights the install would fail horribly but continued on and it worked fine. I then logged out and logged in as admin. and FreeOrion did not show up. That I think is consistent in that Admin. installs for all to see restricted install only in its on profile.

_________________
If it was easy then we all would be doing it!

I may have jumped the gun on this I went to uninstall back in non admin. and the program could not find the uninstall file. I will try this over again but I guess it lets you install the Icons but not write files to the Drive.

_________________
If it was easy then we all would be doing it!

Yes, the installer will sometimes fail to write files, but continue anyway. I will look into it if I have time.

I already tried to Check for the error flag NSIS sets, but it seems to be set even if the install was successful.

About the startmenu-thing:
If you run as non-admin, the installer will only modify the local startmenu, not the global one, as this would fail anyway.
I let the user continue as non-admin only because some people might not have admin privileges and want to test FO anyway; they can, they only have to install it into a folder they have write permissions to.

I think about setting the install-path to "Own Files" in that case.