Re: How to nicely distribute a simple Ada library?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

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"J-P. Rosen" <rosen@adalog.fr> wrote in message 
news:jbkcjv$og8$1@dont-email.me...
> Le 06/12/2011 01:22, Randy Brukardt a �crit :
>> (4) Don't worry about fancy installers unless you are planning a large
>> project that many people will (not might) use. The amount of time sucked 
>> up
>> by creating and testing such things is immense
>
> Which installer are you using? I use Inno Setup (which is free BTW), and
> found it remarkably easy to use and powerful.

It's our in-house design (all Ada code, of course) using Claw for the GUI.

I detest installers that spend many minutes doing navel-gauzing before they 
start, which includes all .MSI-based ones that I've used. So I avoided 
that -- the actual work of installation is trivial and needs nothing that 
isn't present in standard Ada packages.

But our requirements are fairly complex: we have to copy several thousand 
files, call various tools to properly (re)locate the run-time library, 
register patches that make the old, unfixable GUI work, compile Claw if the 
user wants to install that, check for configurations of Microsoft tools (or 
tell them what to do if they're missing), allow the user to select a number 
of options, support the installation of a number of different versions of 
the product depending on what the customer paid for, and test all of that on 
a bunch of versions of Windows. It is an infinite time-sink, just like 
documentation is.

I have the actual creation of the installation packages automated, but that 
doesn't eliminate the testing requirements, or the continual futzing needed 
when the programs change. No commercial or free package is going to be able 
to do anything to eliminate, unless it imposes a very strict set of 
restrictions that I could never live with anyway. (I have a similar problem 
with most of the version control systems I've seen.)

And most libraries are better distributed in a plain old ZIP file anyway --  
anyone who can't figure out how to unzip that and use their compiler's make 
facility shouldn't be programming (in anything!!) anyway. The fancy 
installer is just a time sink.

                                          Randy.