daern
27th September 2006 20:58 UTC

NSIS - this is how installers should be
To all of the developers and community that have worked on NSIS through the years - thanks!

I've made it my personal mission to make NSIS the standard installer for all of my company's products. I'm about 50% there (we still use MSIs for some stuff :( ) but the NSIS installers are always the richest, fastest and smallest of the bunch.

The last installer I worked on was for our flagship Pocket PC application and uses RAPI to deploy the application directly to the device (none of that CAB rubbish) as well as providing the ability to create bootable SD card images should the user wish. NSIS made this project a pleasure to work on and it only took a couple of days work to get the whole thing put together.

Once again, thanks everyone for all of the help and hard work. With luck, I'll be able to contribute some of the stuff I've been working on (I can't do it just yet) which I hope will make PDA deployment much easier for everyone, but in the meantime please accept my appreciation for the wonderful project that has been created here.

Bring it oooooon!

Daern

dandaman32
28th September 2006 03:14 UTC

I second that. NSIS is simply the best installer system I have ever used. Heck I've written entire lightning-fast applications, with highly advanced logic and beautiful UIs, using NSIS. Heck, it shouldn't be called an installer. How about "the NSIS programming langauge"?

I think it should be less assembler stuff though. (yeah, I'm diggin' the stack. Push 'n pop foreva big daddy!) If it had more aspects of PHP - excuse me for that because I'm mostly a web developer now - I think it would easily qualify as a true programming language. Things like functions taking parameters and returning values, while-break-continue support, and native array support would be nice. It would also be nice if we could declare a variable simply by initializing it, and allowing PHP-like variable assignments ($var = 0 not StrCpy $var 0). Though I guess that some of that stuff would require some fancy footwork with memory management. There have been times when I've been working in PHP and I've wished for labels/jumps, the really intelligent type handling (in NSIS integers can be used as strings) etc.

One last thing: it needs the "null" type. Nothing is ever null in the Nullsoft installer. :D

-dandaman32

JasonFriday13
8th October 2006 21:57 UTC

I second that as well. I have not used another installer system since I found NSIS in May of last year. I have also made my own UI, a few example scripts, a few plugins, and modified the NSIS source (most can be found here).

The instruction set is awesome, functionality is just as good, and is very customizable. Big thanks for all developers working on this project!!!

Comm@nder21
9th October 2006 21:30 UTC

i third that ;)

only point is what kichik also mentions some times: the scripting language is a bit "unhandy" :)

daern
10th October 2006 08:48 UTC

I know what you mean about the language. It's a little, well, klunky. But it works. And it's efficient. And, to be honest, it does what I need - most of the time!