[Python-Dev] Windows installers and OpenSSL

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Am 13.04.14 21:41, schrieb Steve Dower:
> I'm willing to embark on migrating the entire installer to WiX, which
> doesn't directly fix any particular issue, but could significantly
> reduce the overhead of building and maintaining the Windows installers.

I somewhat doubt that it could reduce the overhead - the actual
overhead for the MSI generation is fairly small. It's more that the
current Python-based approach is not too familiar to people, in
particular to those that are familiar with WiX (which I, in turn, am
not).

> Martin - are you at PyCon today? Can we chat to figure out what how much
> of the work you do can be automated? (If not, email on or off list is
> good too.)

Unfortunately, I'm not, and I can't really do chats ATM due to timezone
differences. It's all fairly automated; what takes time is that there
is manual steps in-between (e.g. getting the sources from Mercurial,
launching Visual Studio, running the CHM generator, running the MSI
generator, signging with PGP, uploading the files, running the
installer for testing, uninstalling the previous installation, and so
on). It could be done in a single batch file mostly, except that I
never got to write this batch file.

If it's automated, it would still take an hour or so, but it would be
possible to do other things while waiting for the build to complete.

> Alternatively, if you don't want me mucking about with this, tell me and
> I'll stop (being willing does not mean being keen ;) )

If it's that, I'd say stop. It's not that I want you to, but that I'm
skeptical that it solves anything. If you do want to start using WiX,
please do run the current build process at least once before.

The basic instruction for that is "run msi.py". It will tell you
if it's missing files, and anybody familiar with the build process
should be able to figure out how to get the missing files (if not,
just ask).

Regards,
Martin