Re: [Hampshire] Application installers

On 18/02/2008, Adrian Bridgett <adrian@???> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 10:47:50 +0000 (+0000), Richard Danter wrote:
> > I am not a great fan of it, but I do understand why the decision was
> > made. Key points were that IS works on all the hosts we support -
> [snip]
>
> Ah - you see I don't think IS works on _any_ platform :-)
>
> For example, on AIX, I had an "installshield" package. Firstly this
> meant I had to install X-windows on a server. Then it meant I could
> not script the install. Thirdly X is really painful over a dial-up
> link. Forthly it errored with "unable to install" at which point I
> found it was doing an "installp" under the covers - which I then ran
> by hand to discover installp saying "mising prereq foo" so I installed
> foo and was fine.

We no longer support AIX but of course I have no idea what we had to
do behind the scenes to get it to work.

Lack of scriptability is a pain, but the version we use currently has
a workaround which means you do not need X. Not on the actual install
machine anyway...

You can run the installer on another machine (with X) and select the
options you want. Then, rather than installing, an XML file is
generated with your answers. On the machine you actually want to
install on you re-run the installer pointing to the XML file and it
runs entirely in text mode and without asking you any more questions.

Works nicely for people who can't write scripts. :)

Rich