[sword-devel] BibleCS Installer

[L.Allan-pbio]

Thanks for the update. Hope you don't mind the "cage rattling".

My impression is that the uninstallers for the front-end apps can and should 
ignore removal of modules. As the military phrase goes, "that is above my 
pay grade." <b>

The intention may be for the InstallManager to be responsible for removal of 
most (all?) of the installed modules. Troy G would be the one to check with 
on the specifics, but I think that the uninstallers for the actual apps can 
pretty much ignore this complicated task. There is lots that can go wrong 
with removing modules.

Perhaps it is sufficient for the application uninstallers to have a checkbox 
on the "components" page (or the Finish page?) whether to "launch" the 
InstallManager? The functionality of the application's uninstaller would be 
otherwise limited to removal of its specific executable(s), help files, 
.conf files, registry entries, environment variables, icons, StartMenu 
entries, .ini files, jar files, etc. but NOT the modules.

Unless it involves a pda, today's huge hard drives make it a relatively 
lower priority to "clean up" everything during an uninstall. My experience 
is that the fussy reviewers at CNet/Download.com and TuCows pay attention to 
the thoroughness of the uninstaller, but most end-users may not care if some 
resources get left installed if they uninstall the app.

It would still be possible to do a thorough uninstall and "blow away" every 
file, module, registry entry, etc, but the default "flow" of the uninstaller 
for a specific front-end would leave modules and some CrossWire "family" 
registry entries. There should be enough "bread crumbs" left for a 
subsequent installation to be able to find a "sane" place to install to 
facilitate module sharing.

IMHO, I think the difficulty of the uninstaller trying to figure out all the 
combinations and permutations, and then making the choices clear/unambiguous 
to the end-user about what they can and/or could and/or should do are not 
worth the effort, and unlikely to be "bullet-proof".

Here is a scenario:  a person has been using BibleCS sword.exe and decides 
to try LcdBible and BibleStudy and BibleDesktop. The modules are "sort of" 
shared, except some apps find the shared resources within the directory 
structure (i.e. in the same directory as BibleCS sword.exe which is how 
SWMgr::findConfig works now), some use SWORD_PATH, and some have redundant 
resources (mods.d and modules in their install directory and KJV has been 
installed multiple times, for example).

I would advise against the uninstaller trying to figure out this "hodge 
podge" out and attempt to "do the right thing". It seems too likely that 
some modules will get unintentionally deleted which interferes with the 
operation of other apps.

To me, the problem is that end-users with multiple CrossWire front-end apps 
will intend to install a module, and be confused and frustrated when some 
front-ends can "see" the module, and some can't.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to have a separate, simple program that 
"sniffed around" the registry and certain default locations to detect 
redundant modules, such as:
C:\Program Files\CrossWire\The SWORD Project\mod.d
C:\Program Files\CrossWire\LcdBible\mod.d
C:\Program Files\CrossWire\BibleDesktop\mods.d
C:\Program Files\CrossWire\mods.d
C:\Program Files\CrossWire\resources\mods.d
[InstallDir]\mods.d
etc.

and then brought redundancies to the attention of the end-user. Some 
redundancies would be intended, especially for developers. Such a capability 
could perhaps be part of the InstallManager (the "test" version of the 
LcdBible "StarterKit" installer used a very small "proxy" for the 
InstallManager to do some of the above and could probably be enhanced 
easily. This proxy was mostly to be a small replacement for the large 
InstallManager.exe and sword.exe which made the compression for the nsis 
installer be slow.)

My 2¢ worth

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "DM Smith" <dmsmith555 at yahoo.com>
To: "SWORD Developers' Collaboration Forum" <sword-devel at crosswire.org>
Sent: Monday, March 06, 2006 8:24 AM
Subject: Re: [sword-devel] BibleCS Installer


> Lynn,
>
> I just have one aspect left: On uninstall, don't wack installed modules if 
> there is another registered "CrossWire" application.
> While this doesn't do everything on your wish list, I think it goes a long 
> way toward it.
>
> For the last few weekends, I thought I'd get it done, but something always 
> came up. Maybe, I can get it done tonight.
>
> Yes, you have noticed that I have spread myself a bit thin. In spare 
> cycles I am working on cleaning up the KJV2003. Almost ready to check it 
> in and make it available for edits.
>
> In His Service,
>    DM
>
> L.Allan-pbio wrote:
>> Just thought I'd check what the status of the BibleCS installer was. 
>> There was a big flurry of posts in early Feb, but I was wondering if I 
>> missed the actual "release candidate". The last SVN entry is from 
>> September.
>>
>> Not meaning to be impatient, as I observe with gratitude (and awe) the 
>> large number of different aspects of The CrossWire Bible Society that you 
>> are working on. "Well done, good and faithful (and profitable) servant." 
>> I would like to release an update of LcdBible with compatible installer, 
>> and hesitate to proceed until a number of pending issues and questions 
>> related to the BibleCS installer are resolved.
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