[rfc] Windows Installer for bzr

Alexander Belchenko bialix at ukr.net
Tue Nov 29 05:52:54 GMT 2005


In the december I plan to post to the list statistic of the site 
bzr.onembedding.com. Short summary is: people very interested in windows 
installer, because this file was downloaded 3 times more than src archive.

I was tested on Linux creation of windows installer exe, and it works 
well. So main developers of bzr can use my setup script & co for 
creating official windows installer for python. I think I could start to 
work on setup packet (scripts and instructions) for compiling windows 
installer, if you plan to release next bzr version with windows installer.

I'd like to hear some comments about installer.

Now my installer create bzr.bat batch file during installation, but I 
think that creation exe launcher based on Fredrik Lundh's exemaker[1] 
will be more useful. What you think about? And about licensing of 
exemaker? I read license but I'm float in license details.

Second improvements for windows installer could be creation some sort of 
documentation for bzr in html form. Later this documentation could be 
compiled to CHM form because CHM (compiled help by Microsoft) is 
standard de-facto for windows applications. I'm not sure that CHM can be 
compiled on native Linux, may be in Wine emulator.

Right now to documentation package could be included IntroductionToBzr 
(from Wiki) and some sort of automatically generated html [man] page for 
bzr commands. More?

Third improvements could be creation entry in Start -> Programs folder. 
I'm thinking about including in windows bzr some sort of bzr shell (e.g. 
from bzrtools, but shell from bzrtools is not very usable at windows at 
this moment). In future here may be GUI front-end?

What you think about windows installer?
Is community interested in statistics of bzr.onembedding.com or I should 
send this info directly to Martin or Robert?

[1] http://effbot.org/zone/exemaker.htm

Alexander




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