[Scummvm-devel] Windows Installer

Johannes Schickel lordhoto at scummvm.org
Thu Apr 28 15:56:45 CEST 2011


On 04/28/2011 03:06 PM, Alex Bevilacqua wrote:
> I personally would prefer NSIS over InnoDB, but I'm curious if it may 
> make more sense to investigate BitRock instead. Though it's 
> proprietary, they offer an open source license (which I'm sure ScummVM 
> would have no trouble proving eligibility for :P).
>

Since it's proprietary I am strongly against it, even *if* they would 
give us some open source license.

Let's quite their homepage:

 > For our projects that are not fully open source, such as our 
multiplatform installation tool 
<http://bitrock.com/products_installbuilder_overview.html>, we provide 
free, fully-functional licenses to other Open Source projects.

No way I would want to have us provide installers built from an closed 
source project.

> The benefits of this choice would be (some overlap with NSIS/InnoDB):
>
> Multiplatform Support: InstallBuilder installers are native binaries 
> that can run on Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, 2003, 2008, Vista, 7, Mac OS 
> X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris (Intel & Sparc), AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, and 
> Linux (Intel x86/x64, Itanium, s390 & PPC).
>

I can't even say how much I hate such installers on Linux, usually they 
suck, they don't integrate properly into the package management of your 
favorite distro etc. So I am against this.

> RPM Integration: BitRock installers can register your software with 
> the RPM package database, combining ease of use with the powerful RPM 
> package management system.
>

Great... Our porters for RPM based distros are probably better off 
creating custom RPMs. That will probably help in proper dependancy 
management on the distros libraries we depend on too.

> Auto-Update Functionality: InstallBuilder 6.0 includes an automatic 
> update feature that enables you to deliver updates directly to your 
> users. By providing regular updates to users, you'll keep them running 
> your best available version, resulting in increased customer 
> satisfaction and reduced support costs.
>

I don't even want to know how crappy this is on Linux.

> RPM and DEB generation: In addition to creating native executables 
> that can register with the RPM subsystem, InstallBuilder can generate 
> RPM and Debian packages that can be installed using native package 
> management tools.
>

So how does dependancy handling work here? Anyway even if it's not that 
crappy I am still against it.


So all in all: No to BitRock.

// Johannes
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.scummvm.org/pipermail/scummvm-devel/attachments/20110428/c96f4186/attachment.html>


More information about the Scummvm-devel mailing list