[pygtk] PyGTK Installer(Was: Pygtk.org website IRC Meeting)

[Rafael Villar Burke]

Peter Morgan wrote:
> Wonderful stuff.. Guess your the "pyGTK Santa Claus" this year
> spending x-mas at it.. ;-) Thank you.
Indeed! Really useful stuff.
> ..although I haven't had time to test the install yet as  I haven't
> got a Windows machine nearby , but its the first thing I need to do
> when I find a victim.
>
> There are a few questions however.
>
> What is this ?
> http://gladewin32.sourceforge.net/modules/news/
> Does it include a glade interface designer (like glade3) for Windows ?
There you can see there are two versions, one loaded with developer apps
(glade-3, gtk-dev, docs...) and another one with just the runtime. Later
I wonder if a 'networked' version could be created too, that's able to
drive the installation of the most current versions with a connection to
the web. The other two installers would be still very useful to do
offline installs.
> If there an "introductory" web page sintalled as well or is this
> something that needs to be done (I can do it)
I have just had a look to Alberto's NSIS script, and it doesn't have
that yet, so you're very welcome to improve it :). Also, all the
different License files have still to be added. All the relevant
licenses should be collected, edited them using wordpad to save them
using RTF (the wordpad trick is explained in the NSIS documentation to
get smaller file sizes) and adding something similar to the following
lines to the script:
  !insertmacro MUI_PAGE_LICENSE "License.txt"
  !insertmacro MUI_LICENSEPAGE_CHECKBOX
> As far as the installers go I see it as 2 installers
>
> the dev enviroment - this also includes the pygtk ref, tutorial,
> guide, glade designer, pygtk example applications, and the basic
> introductory docs. Hopefully a bit of a  "Welcome to the platform"
>
> and the run time - ie gtk, pygtk and python.
These two flavours would be useful mainly to reduce download size for
people just wanting an environment to run other apps.
> I also assume that the installer can check to see if there is python
> installed for example, or is it up to the python installer to do that?
> eg a minumum version required.
AFAICT, there has been some agreement between the people packaging the
GTK+ runtime to always use the same registry keys to detect whether a
runtime is already installed and get its version. We should use the same
keys and should be able to detect when an upgrade is possible.
I'd also expect that the python installer has some standard registry
key, or I'd check for the ActiveState and python.org installers.

One nice 'flavour' to have would be a 'networked' installer. It would
get a file from pygtk.org which contains information about the  most
current versions of the pygtk, pygobject, pycairo, gtk+, python or any
other installers we would like to support, their download URLs, licenses
and any other details. After checking if the needed packages are already
downloaded or installed, it could fetch the missing ones and later use
Alberto's installer to ease the install/unistall of the relevant packages.

The networked installer could also be used to check for upgrades and,
ideally, would allow us to publish different flavours (user, developer,
bleeding edge). It would be something similar to the jhbuild tool but in
the binary win32 world and with a very restricted scope.

Well... this already makes for a good wishlist for the new year, doesn't
it ;).

As always, any contributions and help to achieve this functionality are
very welcome.
You can ask on the #pygtk channel on irc.gimpnet.net or use the mailing
list to join the effort.

Regards,

Rafael Villar Burke