[kepler-dev] Kepler Installer

Chad Berkley berkley at nceas.ucsb.edu
Thu Mar 18 07:57:33 PST 2004


Hi Xiaowen,

See my comments below.

Xiaowen Xin wrote:
> 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
> 

Does it work for non-windows platforms?  If so, we should try it.

> 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?

Yeah, that was left over from the way we used to do it.  it should be 
removed.

>  
> 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.

Probably a good idea.

>  
> 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?

This actually does do something.  in the eml example pipeline, the token 
@emlsample@ is replaced with the full path to the newly copied 
eml-sample.xml file.

chad



>  
> 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
> 
> 
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