Command line driven packager (OT)

swampyankee has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

O, Highest of Perl Monks:

I've a somewhat bizarre and off-topic request: a recommendation for a packager for use on Windows. The ideal would be scriptable, fully operable from the command line, and reasonably efficient (we're packaging about 250 different data files in a year, split between two four week periods). The project I'm working on is using Perl to drive the packager -- currently, InstallShield -- but we're open to something better.

Any suggestions?

emc

watching reputation dive towards negative values

2005-10-26 Retitled by GrandFather, add (OT) at OP's request

Comment on Command line driven packager (OT)

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Re: Command line driven packager (OT) by GrandFather (Saint) on Oct 26, 2005 at 22:10 UTC
We use Wise which uses a scripting technology. Our build process (using Visual build Professional - highly recommended BTW) edits the script to suit changes in the stuff being packaged like version numbers etc. We are using a fairly old (8.1) version of Wise InstallMaster, but the system works pretty well for us. We generate a lot of similar installers for different modules and it's pretty much just a case of copying a build folder and renaming it to get the build set up for a new module. (There's a bit of magic at various levels going on fo that to happen :) ) Perl is Huffman encoded by design.	[reply]
Re: Command line driven packager (OT) by Tanktalus (Canon) on Oct 26, 2005 at 23:16 UTC
This is actually pretty much what I do for a living: we use a combination of batch files driving perl and VB to non-interactively package to InstallShield for Windows Installer. Our experience says to skip the InstallShield part, and go directly with Windows Installer. My goals for this project, at least the Windows part, is to eventually get rid of all the batch files and VB script, and go with pure perl, perhaps with WIX. We actually use the same perl code to package to RPM on Linux, LPP on AIX, pkg on Sun, and software depots on HP. And I used the same code base to produce an ISMP prototype (which we've abandoned), as well as a few other technologies. If we continue using Windows Installer, we'll probably use WIX. So that would be my suggestion to you.	[reply]