Gosh talk of synchronicity! I was just about to mumble something on the same lines. I've started looking at NSIS as a free windows installer and was wondering what I should do for the Cross-platform installer.

Anyway here are some thoughts at semi-random.

Your 10 tasks looks pretty much correct

It may depend on what your appication is but often the 20 questions can be asked nicely on one or 2 webpages so - if your app is a WEB app then how about a trivial 

./install.pl /path/to/cgi-bin/ browserapp <url>
one liner that copies itself to the cgi-bin directory and then runs the browser pointng to http://localhost/cgi-bin/install.pl which does the rest.

Make sure you have an uninstaller (i.e. 

./install.pl --uninstall
must "just work") and uninstaller must have the option to keep files that were installed in shared locations such as /usr/lib/perl...

If you could support the NSIS script format then it would be really easy to make a combo *nix/windows installer

For apps that don't need any web interaction a standard set of questions (where to install...) and sensible scriptable defaults would be good.

One big irritation with windows installers IMO is that they often seem to expect to be run as "Administrator" even though they probably aren't really doing anything that needs such access. Need to make sure that the *nix equivalent doesn't abuse root.

Installer needs to be able to bootstrap itself from a minimal setup. ?Can you assume perl is installed?

Dingus

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In reply to Re: Is there a perl version of MSI by dingus
in thread Is there a perl version of MSI by tachyon

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