Should I migrate a installer away from NSIS if rewriting a large part of it?
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There is this installer script on NSIS that is a few thousand lines and need a major rewrite. I'm wondering if we should keep using NSIS or if there is anything else that would be considerably easier to use for a complex install?
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That really depends on what you're doing - I use both Inno Setup and NSIS in various projects. Inno is much easier to use, but is slightly more restricted than NSIS (OTOH, there's built-in logging, so if something goes wrong on the user's end, it's usually much easier to debug). NSIS lets you micromanage everything, but scripting is a bit of a pain.
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@ender said in Should I migrate a installer away from NSIS if rewriting a large part of it?:
scripting is a bit of a pain.
Probably why it's thousands of lines. 🤔
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@ender It downloads files and data, do some network checks, and talks to serial ports to check if some hardware is present. I think we can move some of this stuff out of the installer
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Inno's scripting is almost certainly more user(developer)-friendly than NSIS for this (it's Object Pascal - similar to Delphi, though more limited). You can check the examples here.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Should I migrate a installer away from NSIS if rewriting a large part of it?:
@ender It downloads files and data, do some network checks, and talks to serial ports to check if some hardware is present. I think we can move some of this stuff out of the installer
It sounds like a lot of that stuff probably doesn't belong in an installer. Installation and configuration are really 2 separate things. Many people try to do both in an installer. That makes installers complicated (and harder to maintain)! (Installing drivers is an entirely different story. That's just simply complicated.)
