Pomflain
12th February 2002 06:53 UTC

Possible new feature?
One of the issues I'd been dealing with lately was versioning of the installer executables. Specifically I'd make up a new version and then put it up for local testing, then go add some new changes, tweak a few things, etc. and then end up with someone having an issue and it could be one of ten different versions I made up during the day. So I figured I'd add in a time/date stamp to the installer so then I'd know exactly when the version was made. Someone then pointed out to me that some people might like different versions how the time & date are represented locally, so what I came up with is a bunch of symbols. $MONTH, $DAY, $YEAR, $HOUR, $MINUTE, and $SECOND. So then you could represent things however you want. I then use DetailPrint to write it to the details window.
DetailPrint "Compiled: $MONTH $DAY $YEAR at $HOUR:$MINUTE:$SECOND"

Does this interest anyone else as a useful feature? I'm sure you can think of many ways to use something along those lines, I was just looking for some way to keep track of versions without too much hassle.

Pomflain
12th February 2002 07:24 UTC

Ooopppsss
When I moved things from being a compiler command to the $SYMBOL style, now it's putting in the date at runtime instead of at compile time, just noticed that. Oh well, back to the drawing board for me...

bballer182
13th February 2002 07:12 UTC

sounded kind of nice to me

Pomflain
13th February 2002 07:40 UTC

Thanks.
Well I've added it back in as a separate command, but I liked the added flexibility of using it with the current commands. I suppose I could always add it in with a dll, but I don't really think it's worth the extra overhead, and I don't know if that would work right anyway. So I'm just going to leave it as a new command for right now since I need to have that feature in the installers.

rainwater
13th February 2002 15:47 UTC

It may be simpler to just pass a define on the command line. Something like:

makensis /DLOCALVER=1.11.1 script.nsi

Then you could just say:
!ifdef LOCALVER
!define VERSION ${LOCALVER}
!else
!define VERSION 1.1
!endif

Then you just change the define for each of your builds. You could automate the process to do this automatically.

Another solution would be to use an extension dll like the date dll that I wrote. Then create an installer that gets the current date, then executes makensis on the script file using the formatted date as a define as I described above. So you could use an installer to create an installer. If you want the date extension let me know. It lets you create a date format string and call the dll, then it returns the current date in the format you set.

bballer182
14th February 2002 00:18 UTC

sounds even better!:up:

Pomflain
14th February 2002 20:19 UTC

Originally posted by rainwater
Another solution would be to use an extension dll like the date dll that I wrote. Then create an installer that gets the current date, then executes makensis on the script file using the formatted date as a define as I described above. So you could use an installer to create an installer. If you want the date extension let me know. It lets you create a date format string and call the dll, then it returns the current date in the format you set.

SmartyMan
15th February 2002 01:43 UTC

Re: Possible new feature?

Originally posted by Pomflain
so what I came up with is a bunch of symbols. $MONTH, $DAY, $YEAR, $HOUR, $MINUTE, and $SECOND. So then you could represent things however you want. I then use DetailPrint to write it to the details window.
DetailPrint "Compiled: $MONTH $DAY $YEAR at $HOUR:$MINUTE:$SECOND"

Does this interest anyone else as a useful feature?

rainwater
15th February 2002 03:59 UTC

Here's the dll extension that will create any date format string you want. See this thread.