When will ISWI with support for upgrading be released?
Thor Egil Leirtrø
installation set
that can do an upgrade - if an earlier version is already installed - or a
complete installation.
My question is when will we have a version of ISWI doing this without us
having to fiddle around
patching comand lines and custom actions, just to have it - almost - work.
I followed the description given in
http://www.installsite.org/files/iswi/Upgrading.html and found
that my installation set no longer un-installs the files.
Thanks,
Thor Egil Leirtro
MaXware International
Chen Drori
Our final workaround is to bootstrap the .msi with our own home-made
setup.exe, which checks wether or not an upgrade is needed (or allowed), and
starts msiexec with the appropriate command line.
This seems a common enough issue (indeed, I believe anyone who produces a
commercial product with an install will more likely than not require such an
upgrade capability) for it to have been properly addressed in Windows
Installer.
I fail to perceive a reason why, when you want your installation to be
upgraded, you need to start it with a special-purpose (and cryptic) command
line, instead of the installation engine itself recognizing that an upgraded
is required, and whether it is possible, and taking it from there.
I can see how such an option would perhaps require some programming at
installation-build-time on the part of the person creating the isntallation,
but certainly can't think of a reason why the user should take special
actions BEFORE running the installation (read: issuing a special command
line) to perform an upgrade. The installation package should recognize that
an upgrade is required, inform the user, and perform (or not) the upgrade,
according to the user's input.
This is a definate thumbs-down for Microsoft. I would expect more from a
company that wants people to move to using it's installation technology. Of
course, taking into consideration the fact that is no competition (there are
no alternative "Windows Installers" out there. Note I am talking about the
windows isntaller engine, and not the setup/installation development tools
ISWI, Wise, etc.).
Installing on windows should NOT mean no easy intervention-free upgrades. An
no, the fact that it IS possible by writing your own bootrsaps does NOT make
it any less wrong!
As a final note, just to take (some) blame off InstallShield - there is no
way for InstallShield to do this, other than by making their own setup.exes
do the bootstrapping, which would work, but is still not a good enought
solution to the problem. The support for this should be inherent in the
Windows Installer technology.
"Thor Egil Leirtrø" <thor.l...@maxware.com> wrote in message
news:3b32...@12.41.20.38...
Johannes John
I agree with you!!!!!
Regards!
Johannes
"Chen Drori" <ch...@pelicansecurity.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:3b35...@12.41.20.38...
Creative Labs
All you have to do is to edit setup.ini to specifiy REINSTALLLMODE=vemus
Then, if the product is already installed, you will get a Maintenace Type
dialog, select Repair, and all installed features are then re-installed from
your new (upgraded) MSI package. Its probably best to change the dialog text
from 'Repair' to 'Reinstall/Upgrade' or something similar.
Custom actions can be configured to run or not as required using
!FeatureName and &FeatureName in the conditions - during an upgrade both
!FeatureName and &FeatureName will be 3.
As far as I can tell, doing a repair is the same as setting 'REINSTALL=ALL'
on the command line. The 'v' in REINSTALLMODE causes the cache MSI package
to be replaced by the one in the source media, thus allowing an upgrade.
--
--
Martin Robinson
martin....@dai.co.uk
"Thor Egil Leirtrø" <thor.l...@maxware.com> wrote in message
news:3b32...@12.41.20.38...
Thor Egil Leirtrø
"Creative Labs" <martin....@dai.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3b41...@12.41.20.38...
> What's the problem ?
>
> All you have to do is to edit setup.ini to specifiy REINSTALLLMODE=vemus
>
> Then, if the product is already installed, you will get a Maintenace Type
> dialog, select Repair, and all installed features are then re-installed
from
> your new (upgraded) MSI package. Its probably best to change the dialog
text
> from 'Repair' to 'Reinstall/Upgrade' or something similar.
The problem is that I have done this, and also the other tricks found at
http://www.installsite.org/files/iswi/Upgrading.html but my files are still
not updated.
There are no new components or features, so that shouldn't be a problem.
--
Thor Egil Leirtro
MaXware International AS
Thor Egil Leirtrø
"Chen Drori" <ch...@pelicansecurity.com> wrote in message
news:3b35...@12.41.20.38...
> We've also had innumerable problems with this!
>
> Our final workaround is to bootstrap the .msi with our own home-made
> setup.exe, which checks wether or not an upgrade is needed (or allowed),
and
> starts msiexec with the appropriate command line.
That was what my question was about: when will InstallShield handle this?
We have pay a lot of money for this software to get an easier interface to
the Winodws Installer,
so I really excpect the InstallShield software to handle a common task like
checking if the
current installation is an upgrade and act accordingly.
Blaming Microsoft is leading nowhere. The Windows Installer is an API and
ISWI is an abstraction
layer above this which I excpect to handle tasks like this. There is not
much point in paying for a nice
GUI if I still have to do all the programming myself.
--
Thor Egil Leirtro
MaXware International AS
Chen Drori
have to author yourself) and then you must explicitly specify an upgrade
command-line.
This should all happen implicitly, and behing the scenes, without the need
for you to author any of these smarts into your installation.
Oh, and there's no use blaming InstallShield (althought they COULD have
written this into the setup.exes that IPWI generates), because it's an
inherent limitation of the way the Windows Installer 1.1 service behaves.
"Creative Labs" <martin....@dai.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3b41...@12.41.20.38...