Status of InstallShield-Setup Engine

[Mike Hearn]

On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 18:20, Andreas Rosenberg wrote:
> What's seems to be a big problem, is the InstallShield Setup Engine
> we are using (like many others). 

One obvious solution then is to not use InstallShield. NSIS works quite
well in Wine. If you are shipping a Linux version for a customer, simply
using native installers (like RPM or Loki Setup) would work much better.
Is there a hard requirement to use InstallShield, and if so, why?

> Perhaps we can contribute in making the InstallShield Setup Engine
> work. Has anybody tracked what's causing the problem? 

InstallShield is riddled with problems. As Uwe said, it *does* work with
a bit of persuasion but there have been regressions in that area lately,
and every InstallShield is subtly different. Using native DCOM may help.

> I read about "global window handles", but this didn't gave me the right
> clue. Is it related with the API call FindWindow? Is the IS Setup Engine
> using multiple processes and trying to communicate via window messages or DDE?

No, most of the InstallShield problems are related to its use of OLE and
DCOM internally which we only partly implement (it's huge).

thanks -mike