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kvakulo / Switcheroo

The humble incremental-search task switcher for Windows
www.switcheroo.io
GNU General Public License v3.0
778 stars 121 forks source link

Implemented Wix Installer for better installation process for non-technical people #82

Open tarikguney opened 6 years ago

tarikguney commented 6 years ago

Motivation

Chocolatey is nice but a little bit technical. Hence, it is limiting the scope of the users who can download and install this project. With the help of Wix Installer (Wix Toolset), we are now able to easily produce .msi installers and deploy them under Releases in Github.

The new switcheroo installer gives installer, removing, and repairing options: 2018-02-21_15-38-27

Developer Prerequisite

Developers need to download the Wix Toolset from http://wixtoolset.org/releases/. This project has been developed with Wix Toolset 3.11.1.

They also need to download the Visual Studio Extension for Wix Toolset: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RobMensching.WixToolsetVisualStudio2017Extension

Quick Build

When the Wix Toolset extension is downloaded and installed, VS 2017 will start recognizing the project .wixproj extension. Later, developers simply build the Installer project to generate .msi installer files under Debug/Release folder.

kvakulo commented 6 years ago

Thanks for another PR! :)

I'm traveling for the next few days, so I'll take a closer look in the beginning of next week.

Just a few quick comments: There's actually already a Switcheroo installer (chocolatey is completely optional), and it's available to download from the Github releases page. It's automatically built on AppVeyor when new commits are pushed. I guess Wix is more modern than the current Inno installer, so it's probably worth to change it, but more work might be needed before the change :)

tarikguney commented 6 years ago

I have not worked with Inno installer but I can tell that Wix is pretty advanced and configurable. It has all the options that a native Windows Installer has. Regarding the more work, sure. Let me know and I will try to add them :)

kvakulo commented 6 years ago

Hi @tarikguney,

I'm ready to change to the Wix installer if these things get included:

  1. It should be the GNU GPL 3.0 license instead of the Apache License that is presented to the user
  2. Add an option to run Switcheroo op Startup (this should add a Switcheroo.lnk file in the users startup folder)
  3. Build the installer on AppVeyor when new commits are pushed to master (see https://github.com/kvakulo/Switcheroo/blob/master/Installer/Build.xml)
  4. Make sure that the Chocolate packages are working with the new installer

It would also be very cool if the Alt+Tab option could be enabled right in the installer as it would make this option more visible for new users.

Are you up for implementing these changes to the Wix installer? 🙏

/ Regin

tarikguney commented 6 years ago

I will look into those. Thanks.