Uwe Stöhr wrote:
I'm advertising my installer solution here not only because of the installer itself, it costs more time to get the installer working with the third party programs. The actual MiKTeX version was build for my installer and some new features are in now to be able to configure MiKTeX to work perfectly with LyX. The Imagemagick people fixed a lot of graphics bugs and developed new useful features for us (e.g. the PDF cropping). Due to our initiative the BaKoMa math fonts are now under the GPL and also some Ghostscript bugs were fixed for our needs. We should use this!
My idea is to take all the good features of your installer but start with a new set of scripts that will make it possible to integrate everything (both your concepts and the concepts of the official installer) and create something that both developers and users will like.
NSIS is a very powerful tool and can be used in a much more convenient way. Instead of having separate scripts for different installers (like you have right now), it is possible to create a single set of scripts that can be configured to create all installers. This means that there will be only a single thing to maintain.
Using this concept, it is also possible to create installers that will automatically download components like MiKTeX, Ghostscript and ImageMagick only when they are not yet installed. This means that the installer will be a lot smaller and that you only have to download external components once and not again for every new release. Such an installer will also be completely GPL-compatible (while all components are free, some are more restrictive than GPL).
There are also things in the current script that need to be improved, both related to the NSIS language and the several function that deal with the components.
Because I already wrote lots of NSIS-based Windows installers, it is possible for me to provide you all with hack-free scripts that make everything a lot easier. If we now decide to go on with this integrated solution, we can really take LyX/Win to the next level.
Joost
