installer comparisons
Is there anyplace I can read an objective discussion on the different installer systems?
NSSI, MSI, InstallShield, etc
Archive: installer comparisons
installer comparisons
Is there anyplace I can read an objective discussion on the different installer systems?
NSSI, MSI, InstallShield, etc
i don't know.
but i've already tried install-shield, and i must say, that nsis is ways better:
- less overhead
- less trash on target systems
- easier to konfigure for different jobs (if u know the script-language)
but if u ever find a real objective discussion, please post it here. i'm interrested too.
yep, i agree, i hate those install-shield installer extracting files 5 times before you can actually install. and installation itself takes whatever long cause of some strange operations i have not discovered what they even do. nsis is much clearer and just does it's job...and much more than installshield could ever do if you like :)
MSI installer need its runtime... that is 1+ MB
Inno Setup need 500+ kb + plus application files size (that and plugins)
InstallShield (classic) too many files of the installer, if you only have one small EXE.
heh i have an interesting story about this. I wrote a little app for someone, a 17k VB exe file. What does he do? Goes and creates an installer for it using installshield...a 297k intaller.
When I said NSIS, he said he'd tried it but it was a bit too technical. So I did it for him. The thing was 46k, less than 1 sixth the size of his installshield one.
should I tell the wrest of the story? OK I will. the above installer didn't install the VB runtimes, and therefore the result only worked on XP and 2k which come with the runtimes installed. So he just provided a zipfile which contained the necessary runtimes for these users. Not only was this SLOW, it was quite large, roughly 1.6MB. I said, I'll make you a NSIS for this one as well and i did - 916kb. I made an Inno Setup one just to compare and it was 1.4MB
Morals of the story: NSIS is SUPERIOR to EVERYTHING, IF you can figure out the scripting language. Even I'm basically wondering around in the dark with this lanuage, making guesses, and using wizards like the one included with HM NSIS edit and stuff off of the NSIS site to help me.
Second, NSIS and Inno Setup are, at least in my opinion, the best. (NASA uses Inno, but then Microsoft uses MSI so I guess that doesn't mean a lot) And they are both OPEN SOURCE. This is yet more proof that open source software is generally superior to equivelant closed source.
By the way, it took me 10 lines to install VB runtimes with Inno, and yet it took over 25 with NSIS. But NSIS installs them faster and compresses them more, so it's worth it.
maybe one day I'll write an unbiased comparison of all the popular installers, but it's a fair bet that the winner of mine will be nsis