thammr
13th November 2012 12:29 UTC

Listing installer contents
I want to obtain a listing of the contents of installers that I create (zlib compression) so that I can verify and record the contents (contents are dynamically determined at compile time).
Currently I do this manually using 7-zip which handles NSIS installers very well. Winzip on the other hand doesn't support the format.
However, I want to do this from a Java program. Can anyone give me a pointer to decoding NSIS installers using java.util.zip.* (assuming that's possible)? Alternatively, is there documentation on the NSIS installer file format?

MSG
13th November 2012 17:10 UTC

This is not an answer to your question, but have you considered making a list during compilation? You can use !tempfile, then !appendfile, and at the end do !system 'copy "${TheTempFile}" "${__FILEDIR__}\FileLog.txt"' or something like that. Or if you want to use File /r or wildcards, you could make an NSIS executable that gets executed during compiletime (using !execute command), and generates a file list for you.

For even more advanced stuff, you could generate a second .nsi file during compiletime, and compile that and execute during compiletime. The sky's the limit.

thammr
14th November 2012 08:17 UTC

No, I hadn't thought of that. Its a possible solution.
I would still prefer to actually examine the installer contents. But if I can't make any progress there, I'll consider generating the required listings during compilation.

MSG
14th November 2012 15:39 UTC

Future NSIS builds may contain a compiletime function to enumerate files on the compiling system, specifically for generating file lists etc. No idea when this functionality will appear in trunk, though. Anders might have an idea... *cough*

niteflyer
19th November 2012 15:11 UTC

In case you are able and willing to unpack your installer: did you play with http://nsis.sourceforge.net/NfUtils_...essStdSwitches ?
This will enable you to extract your files with a commandline-switch (/x) without actually running the installer's script.

nfUtils.exe itself supports this switch for demo-purposes (see also nfutils.exe /?), see http://nsis.sourceforge.net/NfUtils_header_file#Links

Be sure to use http://nsis.sourceforge.net/NfUtils_...nfu..21AddFile instad of the FILE-instruction in your installer script.

LoRd_MuldeR
20th November 2012 00:45 UTC

Originally posted by thammr
I want to obtain a listing of the contents of installers that I create (zlib compression) so that I can verify and record the contents (contents are dynamically determined at compile time).
Currently I do this manually using 7-zip which handles NSIS installers very well. Winzip on the other hand doesn't support the format.
However, I want to do this from a Java program. Can anyone give me a pointer to decoding NSIS installers using java.util.zip.* (assuming that's possible)? Alternatively, is there documentation on the NSIS installer file format?