Status of InstallShield-Setup Engine

[Robert Shearman]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wine-devel-admin at winehq.org [mailto:wine-devel-admin at winehq.org]On
> Behalf Of Andreas Rosenberg
> Sent: 04 December 2003 18:21
> To: wine-devel at winehq.com
> Subject: Status of InstallShield-Setup Engine
>
> Hi!

Hi!

> I'm new to this list. The company I'm working for, is developing
> software for Windows and as a personal Linux fan I was testing
> our software with Wine from time to time. The last tries (several
> month ago) were still pretting bad, but with the Wine from Suse 9.0
> (snapshot from August 2003)
> there were only "trivial" errors (mostly conformance) which we were
> able to circumwent in our software.

I'm glad to here that we have improved that much.

> I tracked all problems and reported
> them als bugs: (1844, 1845, 1847, 1848) together with a patch for two of
> them.

They all look like valid bugs and the solutions you have proposed for each
one look sane (although I haven't looked at the source of the functions
affected). You should make a patch for each one and submit them all to
wine-patches, where they will be  reviewed.

> We have a customer, who already asked for a version of our software
> being able to run on Linux.
> What's seems to be a big problem, is the InstallShield Setup Engine
> we are using (like many others).
> A played around with it and it crashed in different ways. I looked
> into the bug list and found the rather old "meta bug" #170.
> Unfortunately the link inside is broken.

There is a lack of lack of detail in that bug. I believe there is at least
one bug with a lot of detail on the subject.

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

I belive that it is our lack of proper ThreadingModel support in COM. We
currently ignore the registry parameter
HKCU\CLSID\{GUID}\InprocServer32\ThreadingModel. I believe we do that right
thing in the case of that value being Apartment and the application calling
CoInitializeEx(NULL,COINIT_APARTMENTTHREADED). However, we don't do the
right thing in any of the other combination of flags. I belive the right
course of action is to use stubless proxies to marshal the interface across
boundaries in certain cases. These cases are listed in the books "Inside
OLE" and "Inside DCOM" by Microsoft Press.
Our Local Server COM also leaves a lot to be desired but that may or may not
be needed for InstallShield.

> 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?

I can't remember whether the FindWindow calls are crucial, but AFAIK they
are just graphical issues. I.e. you will see some text missing here and
there.

> If anybody could point me in the right direction, this would be great.
> Otherwise it would be a waste of resources to debug/search stuff others
> already did.

If the main issues for you are with the installer I would get my hands on
the book mentioned earlier "Inside DCOM" from Microsoft Press. Also, Ove
Kaaven has done a lot of work on this so he may be able to help.

> Regards
>
>   Andy

Rob