On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 09:03:35 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
On Friday, 25 September 2015 at 00:25:54 UTC, Manu wrote:
I update DMD yesterday, it couldn't work out where it was
installed and the uninstall fails, then complains and errors
when trying to install over the failed uninstall, requiring
manual intervention.
[...]
There seems to be a trend here:
Windows devs have problems getting D to install/work correctly
on their machines.
Non-windows devs boot up windows and test it and it works fine
for them (In this case that was me).
Thousands of developers download and use the installer just fine.
Right after Walter added 64-bit support it was a chore for each
developer to get it working but it's designed to Just Work these
days (Martin even recently made it offer to download Visual
Studio and install it for you). I don't think this is a
Windows-dev vs non-Windows-dev issue, it's an atypical setup
issue. There is also a history of the installer not being very
good years ago so some of the veteran D users have an
understandable bias against it.
I seriously doubt that much progress will be made here unless
some dedicated full-time modern Windows developers take over or
at least significantly help with the installer code. Someone
like you has years of experience and knowledge about what are
good/bad solutions on windows, what workarounds/hacks are OK
and which will be abhorrent to users, what will likely break in
newer versions of windows/VS etc. etc. etc.
Realistically, no-one except an experienced full-time windows
developer is ever going to get this right.
That's kind of what happened. I started using D and the installer
sucked. I'm no NSIS ninja but I do use NSIS for our commercial
product at work so I was somewhat familiar with it and slowly
made improvements to it. Rainer, Martin, and Vladimir all
contributed things too. Personally I think it's in great shape
these days. I can't think of a single thing I'd change about it.
It's simple and svelte but does everything it needs to (and
doesn't take 10 minutes to install). The only thing that I'd like
to see is Code Signing of the installer and the
executables/binaries included but that requires someone higher up
on the foodchain than me to do (perhaps we can finally get it
when the D Foundation is in place).
