[Mantisbt-dev] Re: [ham] Re: Windows packaging on Linux ?

[Kristis Makris]

> What about nsis (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System)?
> http://nsis.sourceforge.net
> 
> We use it to build our windows packages, but in a mingw/msys shell.
> If you have a cross compiler environment already set, maybe this will
> work (but let me know if you succeed since I am really interested....)

This is disturbing. The minimum build requirements for a developer now
become using wine or mingw/msys to work around using a Windows tool. You
still need to run Nsis under Wine in Linux.

But anyway, given that one has mingw/msys installed, none of the
installers out there (e.g. msi2xml, wix) are in a state where they can
be directly compiled under mingw. One must inspect .sln files to figure
out how they are build and do more work in these installers to get them
compiled under Linux.

I still don't see a tool that can be run out of the box under Linux to
build a Windows installer. A tool in an interpeted language (Perl,
Python, Tcl) that works as an installer on both Windows and Linux, and
can be configured in OS X but run in OS Y. There are over 50 installers
out there choosing not to solve this problem. 

This seems promising http://vainstall.sourceforge.net/ minus the Java
requirement.

This looks interesting too: http://antinstaller.sourceforge.net/ minus
the Ant/Java requirements.

Still, none of these tools can produce a .exe someone can simply run,
with no dependencies on other tools whatsoever. I can't even find a
simple poor-man's solution; some scripts around pkzip/rar/whatever with
self-extracting plus execute a .bat file capability. 

Why is this so difficult ? They put a man on the moon 35 years ago and
we still can't package software. Fabulous.