Make an installer

[Juliasmatius]

Not really an issue but you don't have any other feedback method.

It always irritates when there is no installer.

Iexpress is free and comes with windows. Usage

Installforge is free even for commercial and non-commercial and offers a better UI than Iexpress

If you are using Linux, you probably can figure it out by yourself.

[MrStevns]

Hi Juliasmatius

We started working on an installer #848 for Windows a long time ago, it just hasn't been finished yet. Given that we are all volunteers, there's no say when or if it'll happen.

We appreciate your feedback nonetheless 😄

[Juliasmatius]

We started working on an installer #848 for Windows a long time ago, it just hasn't been finished yet. Given that we are all volunteers, there's no say when or if it'll happen.

Not to be a jackass but I can probably take 15 minutes this evening and make an installer up to your standards.

[scribblemaniac]

If you don't want to be a jackass, then don't ask other people to do work for you and then tell them how easy it would be for you to do it. We're an open source project run by a very small team of volunteers. If you want to make an installer then you are fully welcome to make an installer and make a pull request for any work you do. I believe we are all interested in having a Windows installer. As previously mentioned one of our core development team has already put in a significant amount of work towards this goal. You are welcome to build upon that or start your own thing from scratch.

To make an installer up to our standards, it should at meet all of the following criteria:

• Install the program (obviously :wink: )
• Uninstall the program and register an uninstaller
• Provide a simple user interface for non-technical users
• Support keeping multiple versions of Pencil2D installed on the computer simultaneously (not uncommon to have both a nightly and stable build installed)
• Allow changing of the install directory and opt-in/opt-out of desktop and start menu shortcut installation
• Register file associations for the .pcl and .pclx file types
• Install the correct Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable version if not already present on the system
• Install the ffmpeg plugin alongside Pencil2D
• Support translation into other languages and integrate any necessary translation strings into our Transifex project
• Tested and working on all Windows platforms we support (Windows XP through 11, 32- and 64-bit architectures)
• Automatically build and deploy in AppVeyor as part of our continuous integration pipeline

Also since the very first part of your initial post wasn't addressed: we have numerous other feedback methods you can use. Posting suggestions on our community forum or in our Discord server for example. Links to both are on our Community page. Given that there was no issue for creating a windows installer here before, creating this is appropriate.

[Juliasmatius]

That would be all good except that I have no idea how to use AppVeyor

[J5lx]

Sorry for not replying earlier, I’ve been kinda busy recently. I’m the one who started the installer PR MrStevns mentioned earlier. I have some progress locally which I think is relatively close to being finished. I’ll check how much still needs to be done and depending on how much it is I’ll either finish it myself in the next few days or I’ll just update the PR with the current work in progress so that you can continue from there.

[LxeC]

Inno Setup should be easy and free to use for Windows https://github.com/jrsoftware/issrc

[J5lx]

Earlier I updated the PR with my changes. It’s pretty close to completion now and there are only a few things left to do (notably the localization setup). For details see https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil/pull/848#issuecomment-1668958466. You’re welcome to help with some of the remaining work if you like, just leave a message before you start so that no work is done twice.

Since everyone seems to love dumping their favourite installer software in this issue, I’ll also share some thoughts on these different options as well as the ones I considered:

• IExpress is extremely barebones. You might be able to make an installer that does most of the things scribble mentioned above if you tried hard enough, but it seems you’d have to come up with a completely homegrwn solution for uninstallation. Not very useful.
• Installforge already seems a lot more robust. It seems to pride itself on its graphical UI, but I’m worried about how suitable it is for version contol as well as automation in our build process. It also doesn’t seem super actively maintained and is proprietary to boot.
• NSIS is the software I originally used. Since it’s script-based it’s pretty flexible and it also has a basic C API for extensibility, but it’s also very cumbersome to use since you still have to write pretty much the entire installer and uninstaller logic yourself in a script language inspired by Assembly and PHP (shiver). It’s Open Source and semi-actively maintained by two people.
• InnoSetup is script-based like NSIS. It seems a bit friendlier than NSIS but, judging by the source code of the GIMP installer, still pretty cumbersome. If you need custom logic it seems you have to write it in Pascal. It’s Open Source and semi-actively maintained by one person with outside contributors.
• WiX is the tool I’m now using. It’s mainly used to build Windows Installers (aka MSIs) but also produces .exe bundles to deal with dependencies. Unlike NSIS and InnoSetup it uses an XML-based declarative approach, which results in very robust installers with considerably less boilerplate at the cost of sometimes being somewhat opinionated and inflexible. Bundles can be customized through a fairly comprehensive C/C++ API, which I quite like since Pencil2D is also written in C++. It’s pretty actively maintained by three people with outside contributors and just had a fairly significant new major release earlier this year. It’s biggest weak point is its documentation, which amounts to little more than a (sometimes slightly inaccurate) reference.
• The Qt Installer Framework could be seen as a natural fit since Pencil2D already uses Qt. Its biggest strength from what I’ve seen are its powerful tools for building online installers (like the Qt installer), which isn’t very useful for Pencil2D. It can be customized through JavaScript and C++. Although it doesn’t have any big cons, I also don’t see any big pros.

You can probably see why I went with WiX. It’s actively maintained, produces very robust installers, is easy to customize since XML/C/C++ are already familiar to me, and allows me to get rid of a lot of boilerplate. If you think there’s a compelling reason to use something else, I’m happy to hear it, but you’ll have to give some context and not just dump a link in this issue.