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sharplispers / cormanlisp

Corman Lisp
MIT License
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MSI based installer for Corman Lisp #19

Closed arbv closed 6 years ago

arbv commented 8 years ago

At this time Corman Lisp has installer project for InstallShield. InstallShield, off course, is widely used and proven solution but it is also a proprietary shareware. I think that usage of such tool for an opensource project is questionable.

MSI based installer built with WiX looks like a much better alternative (http://wixtoolset.org/releases/).

As a side effect MSI installer can be used for automatised deploying on many computers at once in some managed environments (computer classes in universities is a good example here) which is a good thing.

It should be noted that SBCL has some code to simplify WiX project generation from Lisp: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/tools-for-build/wxs.lisp

rgcorman commented 7 years ago

Agreed an MSI installer would be good.

arbv commented 6 years ago

I managed to develop a new installer. The code for TXT to RTF conversion was borrowed from SBCL (https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/tools-for-build/rtf.lisp).

There is a new Project in the solution called Installer which might be used to produce the installer (provided that latest WiX 3.X is installed).

http://wixtoolset.org/releases/

Alternatively, makemsi.bat might be used to produce the installer too.

I am not a Windows Installer guru so there might be some caveats. On my machines, it seems to work really well though.