Several quick comments Jorge, first - the ASF only distributes binaries built by project members; that doesn't prevent you or anyone of offering an independent binary build.
second - I *don't* forsee that we will backport all the compatibility of Win64 to httpd 2.2. It's shaping up to be an evolutionary change that would be better 'supported' on trunk/ and then later, in 2.4's release. This means that let's work with trunk, snapshots, and eventually an alpha release of 2.3.x to get some developers compiling and testing httpd 2.x on Win64. As I mentioned on IRC, right now a 'user binary' doesn't help all that much because they really can't help identify the code bugs resulting from the Win64 port. Developers (who have their own compiler installed) can help track down the source of bugs. more inline... Jorge Schrauwen wrote:
Ahh, I don't have Installshield 10, It aint cheap either
One concept was to get the InstallShield 'wrapper' around all the dialogs and so forth, bake it (into databases), and let anyone build the databases. But this would require something like a perl Archive::cab class to encapsulate how-to-roll a cab file, then roll up the msi. It was a project I thought about a long while ago, and might even come back to (maybe even using Python.) There's also the issue that the 'builder' for installshield is actually licensed differently than the GUI tool, and I might be able to work out how to put the MSI builder in any contributor's hands. Let me investigate.
Eliminating the dependency on the MS dll's is possible in a win32 build so I think i can mange that to in a win64 build :)
Hmmm? We want the dependencies; building static means you slurp in the clib into each and every loaded module. There's only one, the c runtime, I don't see us having bindings to the MFC or STL libraries. There is a subcomponent package for the c runtime, to ensure it's properly distributed and registered, as part of the InstallShield base.
The installer should basicly only check if it is installing on Windows XP Pro x64 or Windows 2003 Server x64.
You actually need to determine that it's an x86 platform, I don't think you need to further test for XP Pro v.s. Server v.s. other - otherwise you will break when 2005 Pro is released (or whatever the next similar release is called). I just don't know the MSI magic to test that condition, or if it's even necessary. I also don't know offhand what support Install Shield already offers for 64-bit installs. I'm guessing you don't need to delve into nitty gritty details, and that it will do most of the work for us. Bill
