setup.exe sucks

[Reini Urban]

Christopher Faylor schrieb:
> As loath as I am to admit it, I think that setup.exe should be scrapped
> in favor of one of the other setup projects out there.  We just aren't
> doing a good job of keeping up in the innovation or the tech support
> department.
> 
> I know the reasons that all of the above exist and I TRULY am not
> blaming anyone for this state of affairs.  I think it is just time to
> call an end to this program which everyone seems to struggle with and
> work on providing something better.
> 
> People have previously offered other suggestions for setup utilities.
> Does anyone have a favorite program that they think would be useful
> for the cygwin project?

setup.exe doesn't suck that much.
Just the memory footprint sucks, the UI partly sucks, and update
cycles suck.

I investigated what other existing packagers do, and how we can use it.
I started working on a complete new rewrite, based on some scripting 
language, not c++. (easier maintainence and faster development)
Based on some existing packager. We have the only packager not written 
in a higher level language.

* perl Win32::GUI packaged via par to one single exe for example. 
mandrake drakex as base. Just the abstract GUI layer for Win32::GUI has 
to be added. Tk and console backends currently exist. Or maybe 
tk-native. will get > 3MB
* wxpython compiled to one single exe: Any python installer as base, 
like yast. ~7MB
* some lisp based UI packager: Currently my favorite. Easiest to write 
and maintain for single person. ~2MB
* some php-winbinder UI. ~2MB
* some dhtml or java based packager. A webbrowser as requirement should 
be reasonable. very small
* suneido: This would be very easy to write and maintain. A packager is 
some kind of "hello world" for suneido, but it would get too large. And 
it's an orchid language. ~1MB exe and db (which may contain the app 
also) downloaded on demand.

The main problem are our requirements, that it must be a native windows 
app, with single-click download/open without any interim installer.
-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/