[kepler-dev] Kepler Installer

[Xiaowen Xin]

Hi,

Has anyone considered using NSIS from Nullsoft (maker of Winamp) to
create a Kepler Installer for Windows?  InstallAnywhere and
InstallShield both appear to be commercial products, while NSIS is
licensed under the GPL.  If you've installed Winamp, then you've
probably seen it in action.

http://nsis.sourceforge.net/home/ <- their homepage
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/users/ <- some users of NSIS
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/features/screenshots/ <- screenshots

It looks a lot prettier now than the Winamp installations I remember,
and I think it should be considered as a viable option for creating an
installer.

I did an inventory of what changes Kepler's ant install makes to the
Ptolemy directory on Linux.  Here are the results:
 
1. 26 files are added to the top-level Ptolemy directory.
2. kepler.jar is added to Ptolemy's lib/ directory.
3. 9 xml files are added to Ptolemy's ptolemy/actor/lib/ directory.
4. 6 original Ptolemy files were changed.

Actually the only change made to ptolemy/actor/lib/sources.xml was the
deletion of two newline's at the end of the file; could someone remove
the references to that file from build.xml?
 
The installer also replaced Ptolemy II's copyright.txt with its own. 
They're almost identical, but maybe it would be better to have both
copyright.txt's there.
 
Detailed information is at the end of the email.

How would you all feel about creating a kepler subdirectory and putting
all these files in there instead?  As it is, Ptolemy's top-level
directory resembles a messy room.  It's much harder to make sense of a
directory listing there, and to understand the directory hierarchy.  If
we created a subdirectory for Kepler, then it would be much easier to
distinguish between files installed by Kepler and ones that were part of
the original Ptolemy installation.
 
As far as I can tell, the only files we'd have to change to make this
work are the few files that were changed from the original Ptolemy ones,
because they're the only ones that refer to these files, so would break
if they changed locations.

Another small thing is that the build.xml file contains the line:
    <filter token="emlsample" value="${ptolemydir}/eml-sample.xml"/>
but I can't find "emlsample" anywhere else in the file, so it's probably
a useless line; could someone delete it?
 
What extra things does the installer on Windows do?  Ilkay, you've said
that the Windows installer creates a demo directory and a documentation
directory, and that there's a file called vergil.lax.  What does
vergil.lax do?  It's not present on Linux.  I think we should work to
make the installers on Linux and Windows do basically the same thing
because this is just plain confusing.


Xiaowen


----------
 
Files added by Kepler:
 
backpropModel.xml
BrowserandWSInterfaceDemo-TRY.xml
classifier.xml
config.xml
DiscreteLogistic.xml
eml-sample.xml
eml-simple-plot.moml
garpModel.xml
geon_logo2.jpg
GEONMapHierarchicalModel.xml
grass-test.xml
HaltIteration.xml
kepler-index.html
kepler-logo2.png
LVPredPreyLogistic.xml
LVPredPrey.xml
model-density-gridder-dimension.xml
nmiworkflow-example.xml
PIW-full.xml
ptIIplanet.gif
queryTestDB2.xml
queryTest.xml
sample.dat
sdmcenter.gif
seeklogo.png
UserInterfaceDemo.xml
 
lib/kepler.jar
 
ptolemy/actor/lib/DynamicActors.xml
ptolemy/actor/lib/eml.xml
ptolemy/actor/lib/garp.xml
ptolemy/actor/lib/geon.xml
ptolemy/actor/lib/gis.xml
ptolemy/actor/lib/kepler.xml
ptolemy/actor/lib/nmiworkflow.xml
ptolemy/actor/lib/spa.xml
ptolemy/actor/lib/webservices.xml
 
 
Files changed by Kepler:
 
copyright.txt
ptolemy/actor/lib/sinks.xml
ptolemy/actor/lib/sources.xml
ptolemy/configs/basicActorLibrary.xml
ptolemy/configs/doc/demos.htm
ptolemy/configs/graphTableauFactory.xml