FWD: Re: Problem w/ IDLE on Win2000

[Tim Peters]

[Thomas Heller]
> ...
> IIRC the past discussions, inno was lacking an important feature. Had
> this to do with admin/non-admin installs, or is it fixed now?

Inno had no conditional commands of any sort, so *some* things we want to do
differently between admin and non-admin installs couldn't be handled.  Most
PLabs users probably couldn't care less.

The difference in the Wise script is accomplished via massive and
error-prone script near-duplication, in the two branches of multiple if/else
blocks, where the guts usually differ just in whether the target hive is
HKLM or HKCU.  Inno automatically does most of that by itself, but not all.

The most recent Inno incorporates a previously popular addin, which embeds a
full-blown Pascal(!) interpreter into the installer.  This lets you do just
about anything (or so I'm told).

> Anyway, I know wise much better than inno,

OTOH, Inno is much simpler than Wise.  For example, Fred Drake built a
Windows installer for expat with it in a day, despite not even knowing how
to spell Windows.  Mark Hammond is building the spambayes Outlook addin
installer with Inno, and also speaks Wise, so his perspective would be worth
sucking out of his upside-down brain too.

> and anyone

Indeed <wink>.

> ...
> And while we're on it: what's the state of the htmlhelp file for
> windows? Last time I looked, the build script was in CVS, and it even
> worked.

I spent a fair bit of time on that, and so did Fred, and we left it in good
shape when we stopped.  There was no sanction to put any company time into
it, and we both ran out of spare time to pursue it.  Instead we ship 1,200+
HTML files that don't compress well in zip format, and are nearly impossible
to search.  IOW, win-win <wink>.