[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell-Cafe Digest, Vol 34, Issue 45

[Jeremy O'Donoghue]

Hi Jason,

Just as a short follow-up on the question of installers:

On 27/06/06, Jason Dagit <dagit at codersbase.com> wrote:
> On 6/27/06, Jeremy O'Donoghue <jeremy.odonoghue at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > My applications are mainly for internal use at my workplace, and come
> > with Windows installers (I use Inno setup with wxHaskell - never
> > managed to make it work with GTK2, so these applications were
> > delivered as zip files which just had to be unzipped in a certain
> > place).
>
> Do you have any advice about using Inno with haskell?  Have you tried
> wix at all?
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/

I haven't looked at Wix. Inno is particularly straightforward as it
has a 'wizard' interface (the script wizard). The basic steps (for
wxHaskell) are:

On screen 1: add application name, version, publisher and website (if
applicable)

On screen 2: add application install base directory and directory
name. Decide if user can change these or not.

On screen 3: add main application executable. Add any other
files/directories used (In my case, I typically have only the main
.exe file, wxmsw24.dll, wxc-msw2.4.2-0.9.4.dll and, possibly, a
bitmaps directory and/or help files).

On screen 4: Decide where in the start menu you will put the application.

On screen 5: Any application documentation: license, pre-install
readme, post-install readme.

On screen 6: Define any language support details.

On screen 7: Define setup compiler output directory, output filename,
any icon to be used and (optionally) a password.

That's it. The wizard generally produces all I need for a simple installer.

> Maybe you have a developer blog I could read?

I don't. I fear that I would start full of good intentions, write a
few posts and then find that I had no time... I'll try to share what I
know via the wiki as Simon suggested (will be putting this installer
stuff, suitably edited, in the wiki shortly).

Regards
Jeremy