Aronzak
22nd December 2008 10:17 UTC

Automated NSIS installer
There's a great open source project called the Open Disc (http://www.theopendisc.com/), which is a collection of open source programs for windows. Most of them use NSIS as an installer. At the moment, in order to install any of these, one must manually run every installer. Many of them are extremely similar. Most of them use the GNU GPL, and it's ridiculous to accept it several times.

I was wondering if it would be feasible to somehow allow several programs to be installed at once, accepting only one license agreement if they are collectively licensed. This would make it much easier and more convenient to use the open disc. I know that it would be possible to do something like this by remaking a special version of every installer script, that specifically did not have a licence and used some defaults. Since there are a lot of programs, that would be a lot of work. But, if necessary, it would be possible.

Animaether
22nd December 2008 12:19 UTC

I think you would have to take that up with the Open Disc initiative / the respective software authors.

The installers may not have silent install (what you're looking for) functionality built-in, in which case that would have to be added. For those that do, and that share the same license type, somebody (Open Disc) could write a master installer, using NSIS, sure. I wouldn't underestimate the task, though.. applications on the disc get added, updated, removed, etc. and all of them would likely require changes to the master installer as well.

Aronzak
30th December 2008 02:00 UTC

Yeah, I suspected as much. Installshield had some feature that let it run through automatically without the need for user input. But maybe they put it in because their installer sucked so bad.

Afrow UK
30th December 2008 02:06 UTC

Passing /S (case sensitive) on the command line typically would be enough with the exception of message boxes that haven't used the /SD option (these message boxes will still display in silent mode).

Stu