XUL Talk:Installation Story

Benjamin:

I think what you have specified here is excellent.

What would happen if the user is using a Mozilla browser that dose not use XULRunner. I assume that it would fallback to the exe?

We also need to think about, what if the user is using Firefox on XULRunner 1.8 and he clicks on an app that needs XULRunner 1.9. We need to then prompt him that he needs to install the new version.

Where would the list of apps installed for XULRunner reside?

Gary 08:27, 23 Nov 2005 (PST)

NSIS work

I've got an NSIS script which can deploy XULrunner, register it and then install apps. It adds shortcuts and appropriate registry entries to get things like irc:// links working in ChatZilla, and uninstalls cleanly.

Issues at the moment:

1. Because -install-apping something doesn't add shortcuts at the moment, I'm doing it myself in NSIS. This only means setting a variable in the install script, but it means that it isn't fully generalised. This should really change.

2. I can't see a documented way of querying XULrunner to find out how many apps are installed. This means uninstall is all-or-nothing at the moment.

3. Ideally the installer exe contains only the xulapp wrapped in nsis. I haven't added the logic required to check for an existing system xulrunner and net-install one if it isn't available, but I don't expect that to take more than a night.

4. The "install an XPI if you're using Firefox and an exe if not" thing seems really awkward to me. XULrunner apps are independent of the browser anyway. It means that XULrunner will have to go around generating its own uninstallers and so on, and that sites will have to keep two downloads (an xpi and an exe) and use a js install trigger rather than just providing download links.

Of these, the difficulty in order from hardest is 2, 1, 3 with 4 being a technical niggle with the spec. Thumperward 14:38, 7 Feb 2006 (PST)