[Tclish-devel] Installer modules

[Steve C. <ste...@mq...>]

I thought I'd get the ball rolling with some organisational suggestions and a 
brief review of what we already have. 

My current feeling is that we should develop at least two packages in 
addition to whatever installer applications are deemed useful.  These would 
be: 

** package installerutils, Tcl installer utilities. 
 - This would include useful routines for installation scripts on various     
   platforms.  If possible these should be abstracted away from platform      
   specifics.  

 - This package should define the configuration file language/data
   structures. 


** package installergui, Tk installer elements
 - Provides a framework for a graphical installer with the standard GUI
   elements like package selectors, directory selectors etc. 


For installerutils there are already some useful routines available:

ms_shell_setup by Earl Johnson. <url: http://www.erols.com/earl-johnson/> 
 provides an interface for manipulating file associations on windows.

RegisterFileType by Kevin Kenny 
 similar to ms_shell_setup for creating associations only.

progman.tcl by me <url: http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/~steve/tcl/>
 adding start menu entries via dde on windows.

tclish
 defines a configuration file format and a collection of GUI elements based
 on code from Effective Tcl including a configurable form displayer.  Can
 grab packages from local directories or archives  or remote archives via
 http. 

tclxml 
 some overlap with tclish, provides another configuration file format. Can
 extract some configuration info from TEA config files.  

There are also some relevant packages that might be made use of in an 
installer application: 

freewrap and/or prowrap - packaging up distributions or installers into 
single file applications.

tlink32 - creates shortcuts on windows

mkZiplib - a simple wrapper around the zip/unzip library, allows unpacking of 
zip files from tcl.


I'd welcome some discussion on this partitioning of packages. If there is 
some agreement we should think about what should go into each and begin by 
collecting together what we have and filling in the blanks.  

Steve