[lokisetup] Features for Setup 2.0

Stéphane Peter megastep at megastep.org
Sat Nov 23 17:16:50 EST 2002


Le sam 23/11/2002 à 08:26, John Quigley a écrit :
> I've only worked with loki_* for a few days, but I have some ideas:
> 
> - portability: it would be nice if it was portable to mac/win32.  Over at 
> www.garagegames.com, there is a fair amount of interest in a cross 
> platform installer/update program.  Right now people are using different 
> systems for different platforms, which complicates things.  

I agree with you here...

> - scripting: it would be nice if most of the setup was implemented in a 
> portable scripting language like lua/python, which then drives a c-backend 
> that does low level functions.  So operations like installing the right 
> menuitems would be entirely in script, but copying files would be 
> implemented in c.  I just really dislike bash ;)

That's all good, but the main issue IMHO is how do we guarantee that a
script in the chosen language will work on all platforms ? Do we package
the language on platforms that are not guaranteed to have it (full
Python distro in setup? Yuck!)
 
> - integration of xsu: this is a minor issue, but it would be cool if setup 
> let you pick an installation type (all users or just for me) at startup, 
> and asked you for root's password if necessary depending on the type.  update 
> would probably need to be modified.

Integrating xsu in the main code isn't too big of a task, actually. This
is something we could do, although it can be a bit tricky (and xsu is
not working perfectly as is either).
 
> Regarding on demand-installs, it would have to be secure.  I thought about 
> doing this with loki_update for an upcoming game, where you download the 
> initial installer manually then update actually grabs the full game.  But 
> then I realized that the full game would be out in the open and 
> accessible to all (this is a for-sale game).   So I'd have to implement 
> some kind of security model.  I scrapped that idea. :)

Maybe you should consider Loki's approach were basically only binary
updates and demos are available online (never the full game). Then you
can control the release of the full game as you see fit.

> For the update problem generally, I had the vague idea to integrate 
> subversion as the backend for the update system.  
> Apparently it does efficient binary deltas, so updating your local game 
> installation would just be a matter of bring it in sync with the 
> repository with a subversion command.  GUI installers could make this 
> procedure "painless" for the end user.  Just an idea though, would 
> need to prototype it.  :)

I'm reluctant to change the current loki_update mechanism now - but am
open to suggestions to improve it ;)

-- 
Stephane Peter
Sr. Software Engineer
Codehost, Inc.




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