COM / InstallShield status

[Mike Hearn]

 > Likewise, what's the current status of Installshield support,
 > and how much work would it be to fully support
 > Installshield-based installers?  I don't see any
 > open Installshield bug reports, maybe I should file
 > one against the apps I have that don't install at
 > the moment.  (Or would that be overkill?)

Rob and I did some work on InstallShield for iTunes a few months ago, 
since then AFAIK no work has been done.

Status back then was that the InstallShield 7/MSI hybrid installers 
worked pretty well, the bug I chased for nearly a week was refcounting 
related (the backend wasn't shutting down) and since that was fixed I 
believe it works pretty well.

The other main problems I'm aware of are:

- needs stdole32.tlb, we have a program to generate this in CrossOver
   and it needs to be pulled upstream as previously discussed.

- Painting problems. I've not investigated this deeply but I'm 99% sure
   I know what the problem is. I've even written a patch to fix it as
   part of investigating iTunes, but I never tried the patch with an
   InstallShield that shows the issue.

Apart from those two there are mostly just generic issues - 
InstallShield contains its own scripting language which heavily 
exercises the variant APIs, so it sometimes shows up problems with them. 
I believe Marcus found an issue with them thanks to InstallShield recently.

In other words, InstallShield *should* work though it might not be pretty.

There may be installers out there which don't work, I'd like to start 
nailing them once I get back to Wine hacking. I don't know if I'll get 
time however. Also, Murphy continues to smack me down w.r.t internet 
connection, the ISP sent me the wrong type of modem and yesterday I 
discovered the phone socket I was going to connect the modem to doesn't 
actually work :(

thanks -mike