Another thing I’ve been working on lately is a couple of finishing touches to my PopTray fork, so I can distribute it (icons, installer, graphics for the installer, etc).
In particular, my top priority was creating an installer. I thought I might have to start from scratch there, but it turns out Renier was using NSIS for the installer, and the configuration file used to create the installer is included, so while I tend to prefer applications that are a bit more visual than NSIS and have menu options and check-boxes to configure how your installer will work and function, this one was almost all the way there. It was easier to just fix the problems with the existing installer script (like creating images and folders needed by the installer) than to start over from scratch with a different installer.
I see the advantages in certain environments that the install script system used by NSIS is very customizable for specific install procedure needs and would be easy to track changes to the install script in version control systems since everything is stored in one text file until you compile it into a setup.exe, however, it is also a bit fragile by the same nature.
It would be quite easy to overlook or make a typo in the name of a file that needs to be deleted when uninstalling and have it not uninstall completely because of that. That, and I’d kind of rather not have to pull out a manual every time I want to know what a particular line of the script does, or to figure out whether the line is actually necessary. And then if you comment out an image here from the script, then the macro it creates needs to be commented out there as well or it just breaks and won’t compile. It makes a nice small installer without a lot of overhead, but less flexibility would also mean less opportunity to introduce a mistake into the installer script. I don’t want to worry about registry keys needed to uninstall the app being in my script, I want the compiler to take care of that part, I want to be spending my time specifying that the following files go in program files and the following files go in application data 😉