Re: Binary distributions

[Philip Nienhuis]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On  2-Aug-2011, PhilipNienhuis wrote:
>
> | It is my plan (and back on my priority list) to help Tatsuro with this. I
> | was underway but got distracted.
> |
> | Once a number of MinGW specific issues are ironed out, it wouldn't be too
> | hard to transform Tatsuro's binary and his build environment into an
> | "installer" (AFAIU a mere glorified unzipper with some bells and whistles).
> | Some days or weeks back I've seen a post from someone who offered help
> | there.
>
> As I understand it, the 3.2.4 Windows binary that is on the Octave
> Forge site is packaged using NSIS.  Is that what you meant by
> "glorified unzipper with some bells and whistles"?

Yes.
In the end that is what all Windows installers are.

Glorified = clickable stuff on nice pop-up windows with attractive 
graphics; bells and whistles = adding shortcuts to Start Menu, desktop 
icons, comparing available versus required disk size, figuring out 
default installation path, SSE2 or SSE3 libs, etc.

The contemporary .msi installers (Microsoft standard) also check support 
SW versions and user privileges, and allow for a real smooth uninstall / 
roll-back (the latter is a pain with many installers).

Last I read was that NSIS had some issues with localization. Maybe that 
has been solved now.

Philip