I have played with both the free InstallShield tool that comes with Visual Studio and with the Visual Studio Installer, although I have not tried to make an installer for ROOT Here are some comments: 1) The free InstallShield is pretty crippled for anything other than a very small distribution, because they limit you to only five or six file groups. The standard installation of ROOT needs more than this. 2) The Visual Studio Installer (the MS product) has a few significant drawbacks: a) It requires people not running Win2000 to download and install a LARGE installer package from Microsoft. This is just a one-time thing, but may be a pain for people with slow or intermittent connections to the internet (not every nation is blessed as the US and Western Europe are with access to fast, cheap connections) b) The Visual Studio Installer is pretty rudimentary and is really aimed at producing installations for ASP web sites and Visual Basic or Java applications. I asked repeatedly in some microsoft newsgroups about how to use with with Visual C++ projects and discovered that while it's possible to do so, it's not simple or straightforward. Many of the features of the Microsoft Installer can't be accessed easily with the Visual Studio Installer and require you to manually edit the installer database file using Orca or a similar tool. The difficulty of working with Visual Studio Installer is why InstallShield and Wise are selling products for nearly $1000 to build Windows Installer installers. One thought I have here is that Wise has donated copies of their product for building Windows Installers to several open source Python projects. Someone on the Root team might want to contact them and see if they would be willing to donate a copy of their installer builder to the Root team. =========================================================================== Jonathan M. Gilligan jonathan.gilligan@vanderbilt.edu
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