[kepler-dev] Re: [SDM-SPA] Kepler Installer

[David Buttler]

A quick follow up to these questions:

1) in the first conference call relating to the InstallSheild vs. 
InstallAnywhere discussion, I remember that someone from Ptolemy had 
said that they used a free version of the InstallAnywhere installer.  
Can we get a pointer to that free version?

2) I still am unsure of exactly what the kepler installer is supposed to 
be doing.  Xiaowen has listed several actions that the ant installer 
takes below, but it seems that the windows installer is doing something 
significantly different.  Would it be possible to get a list of all 
installer actions?

4) Speaking of installs, it seems I owe a big apology to the producers 
of the previous build.  Apparently, the problems that I ran into were 
due to issues with my laptop. [I was unable to install other software as 
well, even with a sys admin doing all of the work].  I am still 
frustrated with InstallSheild for producing incomprehensible errors [I 
still don't know the cause of "error 2203", although I now know what 
this particular error means].  As far as I can tell, it was no fault of 
Zhengang or Ilkay, or anyone else involved with producing the SPA 
install program.  But I would like to point out that this shows 
*potential* problems with an install script -- all errors need to be 
caught, and informative error messages displayed.  If the tool breaks, 
that is beyond our control, but anything short of that should be 
gracefully handled.

5) It seems that one of our installer goals is to have a complete 
package that includes all of the software that we depend on (JRE, 
Ptolemy, and Kepler additions). As a first step, would it be a good idea 
to put together the list of actions required to produce the final 
working product as a large ZIP file?  While this may not be sufficient 
for our final users who may expect a simple point-and-click installer, 
as an intermediate step that produces something that can be used 
immediately, but requires a little more user sophistication seems 
reasonable to me.  And by explicitly specifying the install steps 
(outside of a particular install product), we should be able to more 
easily synchronize the different platform builds.

6) As a final note, I would like to make sure that we have a CVS tag for 
each beta version of source code that will be used by the installer.  
This should help minimize the confusion of what exactly is in a 
particular build.

Dave

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
>
>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
>
>
>
>  
>