Re: To use or not to use InstallShield

[The Myers Family <samyers at SURRY dot NET>]

I have seen Unix before, but I'm no sysadmin-- nearly all of my practical 
experience is MS-DOS/Win16/32.  I have used InstallShield to build setups 
for a commercial application.  Registry hacks, Autoexec.bat modifications, 
Version checking, Disk Space checking, Multiple install options, Uninstalls, 
and LOTS of other great features are available to InstallShield developers.

But...

If all you need to do is unzip files, InstallShield is major overkill.

Further, a tarball distribution would NOT force every Win95/NT user to wade 
through using tar and gzip.  I use WinZip, which rips through .tar.gz 
and .tar.Z archives as easily as plain old ZIP files.

Take a hard look at Mummit Khan's distributions.  I was able to download 
his build of ECGS-1.0 for Mingw32, extract files with WinZip, set some 
environment variables (via his DOS batch file), then compile and run a Hello 
World.  In about 10 minutes (after download time, of course) ECGS was up 
and running.

Whether the target audience is Unix developers or Win32 developers really 
doesn't matter.  All developers have a knack for making things work.  That's 
why we do this stuff.

Well, I suppose these pennies a are starting to add up, two cents at a time.  : )

Gary Myers

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