M
MattStickney
Guest
The current scheme of having one enormous installer that can install every product Progress makes (or a large subset thereof) is enormously inconvenient for common use cases. The new Custom Installer Bundle feature might mitigate the issue somewhat, but having separate per-product installers solves it completely. Let's take a typical example: I need to install a client program on a customer's machine. In order to do that, I need to download the installer package for the right Progress version (about 2Gb as of 10.2B), a second installer package for the latest service pack (about 1Gb as of 10.2B SP8), and sit through both installation processes. Even with just a Client Networking license, that installs 500Mb of data, including unecessary source code and database-management utilities. When the COM/ActiveX registrations become corrupt, as they're prone to do from time to time, I have to do a full uninstall, possibly re-download 3Gb worth of installers, and sit through two installation processes again (or use the registry-fix tool, which might fix the problem, maybe.) If you look at the actual data required to run a Progress client, it's about 75Mb in total, including optional .NET components. I know, because I made a standalone installer for it. It's about 20Mb, it installs in 5 seconds, and I can run a self-repair if things ever get wonky. It's got the current service pack rolled into it, and it's spectacularly easy to use. Let's take another example: you have an installer for ODBC drivers as part of the Client Networking package, which doesn't actually install anything. That's insane! What's more, it doesn't-actually-install-anything in a way that is intensely unreliable (ODBC drivers only available over a shared folder? who thought that was actually going to work?). Now I understand that the ODBC driver installer works the way it does so that people don't use it to bypass the need for a Client Networking license. There's a really easy solution, though: make a separate installer that takes license information on install like the current installer does. That way you have a nice, small package, no weird reliability issues, and no license violations. If you have separate product packages, there isn't even any special need for the whole Custom Installer Bundle schtick, since you can just take the packages you need (but hey, you can still make Bundler if you want!).
Continue reading...
Continue reading...