6 ms·

From the comments on the blog. > This is a comment made in a software called InstallShield, version X at last, a software intent to create installers, so it pr

by iKlsR 4y ago

From the comments on the blog. > This is a comment made in a software called InstallShield, version X at last, a software intent to create installers, so it probably will appear in many other products. > Found in a InstallShield sample that I was reversing to check if it's a malware. The line made me chuckle, and it's so heartwarming to see someone actually made a blog on it and the fact the line has been around since 2003. Relics like these make me so nostalgic for the 00's Internet days. To anyone reading this, fist bump from a fellow Int3rW3bz lurker.

pteraspidomorph 4y ago
Good old InstallShield. At one point it was everywhere, and then... it wasn't. I keep all the bundled installers I've ever had in a folder. Currently there are files there from 2009 onwards (older ones are archived somewhere). I didn't bother looking for the older ones, but running grep -a ether-rot-mutex quickly yielded a match containing the entire snippet! The culprit is the installer for Ulead (now Corel) PhotoImpact 12 and it has been there since 2010.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Installshield as a product had... (has?) absolutely incredible incidental complexity. It's really hard to communicate the scars, if you never dealt with it, you dodged a bullet. Under the next -> next -> finish you saw, was basically a fountain of tears. That software directly relished and consumed the salty tears of engineers. It demanded them as sacrifice, to make the installs keep happening. You would think that a product which did nothing but facilitate that workflow would hide, or somehow ease your pain but somehow it made it so that it never worked by default and it was your problem as "installer engineer" (aka short-straw-haver) to fix it.
  - self_awareness 4y ago
    But it had to solve some original problem (while maybe introducing others). Otherwise it wouldn't be used? From user's POV, I've always preferred IS installers than Wise, but I haven't created any packages even once. I was always just the "next-next-finish"-type of user ;)
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      A cut down (but still very functional) version of Install Shield came bundled with Visual Studio, Delphi, C++ Builder and perhaps others (they were somewhat customized versions for each) so for many it was available out of the box. And the included version had a wizard to quickly create an installation project so unless you wanted something advanced, making an installer was a matter of selecting your program's files, the name of any Start menu shortcuts (and perhaps a couple of other things i forget) and then building the installer. For a ton of people it was more than enough. I think at the time its main "drawback" was that it made installer downloads from the internet a bit awkward since it generated tons of files, but many archiving tools (WinZip, WinRAR, etc) added options for making self-extracting archives that can launch applications, so the combo of a WinZip self-extracting archive that launches an InstallShield setup.exe was very common for a very long time. But basically the reason it was used a lot was that it was easily available to the users of the most popular development tools at the time.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - pjc50 4y ago
      It made you a standard executable Windows installer. Inexplicably there wasn't a decent first-party Microsoft solution to this until the Microsoft Store era. There wasn't really effective competition, probably because it's hard to get people to pay for developer tools and it's a hard problem to do well.
      - zokier 4y ago
        Umm.. MSI has been a thing since Windows 2000, and WiX (and native support in VS) for creating those.
  - e40 4y ago
    Ah, yes, I remember it well. The day I jumped to NSIS was a good day.
    - eptcyka 4y ago
      Is NSIS really that much better?
      - e40 4y ago
        Yes, I think it is. But, it's not great. The pseudo assembler language is not great, but it was definitely easier for me to deal with, perhaps because there were lots of other people using it and sharing info.
  - grishka 4y ago
    Probably a good thing that when I built a Windows app in 2010 and needed an installer for it, I used InnoSetup. It was surprisingly easy to get something decently working out of it. But yes, I remember that a lot of installers were InstallShield, and the thought that it might be a mess on the inside has never once crossed my mind.
    - DougN7 4y ago
      InnoSetup stills works great, and is still pretty easy to work with.
  - octopoc 4y ago
    I never messed with InstallShield but I have used NSIS (free), Wix (free), and Advanced Installer (paid). Advanced Installer is absolutely worth it in my opinion, although it still has trouble hiding the nightmare of Windows installers. NSIS syntax is a cross between PHP and assembly. Wix is literally an attempt to program a database using XML. That's three things that don't fit together well. Part of the problem is that most Windows installers are based off MSIs, and MSIs were made for MS Office by some engineers who thought relational databases were cool, so they made everything in MSI be a relational table.
  - PsylentKnight 4y ago
    My very first tasks as a new software developer were to revamp some legacy installers created with Installshield. It made me think that I chose the wrong career path. Just about everything I've worked on since then feels easy and painless compared to that.
- honkdaddy 4y ago
  13 years of installers.. That's some impressive digital pack-ratting! What's the idea? Just in case you ever need the installer again and it's no longer hosted online?
  - thedanbob 4y ago
    You never know! Not the OP but I encountered a situation recently where my wife needed an old version of some software that was no longer available to download anywhere. (It pairs with an "smart" embroidery machine of hers.) Luckily I managed to find a copy of the installer in the temporary internet files directory of her old PC.
  - pteraspidomorph 4y ago
    It's true that I don't trust the permanence of online resources, usually with good reason. But I can also be a bit of a digital hoarder. My IRC logs, for instance, go all the way back to 1999. It's funny because in meatspace I'm extremely tidy and don't keep any garbage. I have a single wardrobe with shelves of computer parts (mostly cables, wires and screws) and a few old CDs. I have nothing from before April 26, 1999, the date when the Chernobyl virus destroyed my hard drive and wiped out all of kid me's QBasic programs (what a loss for humankind). Kid me could not afford the storage space for backups, nor did he have the discipline anyway.
baisq 4y ago
I just checked the installer of GTA San Andreas and indeed there it is.
DANK_YACHT 4y ago
This got me thinking, why are installers still necessary on Windows? Why have they never adopted a packaged solution similar to .app on macOS?
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  Microsoft store applications are conceptually similar to the dmg/app approach macOS has taken (and have most of the same limitations and restrictions). A few design decisions from the early Windows days tend to keep installers around on windows, though. Windows uses a single shared registry for persistent application settings (instead of something like a plist/config file local to the application) which has some clear upsides because settings are centralized and can be deployed fairly easily by admins and applications can read settings for other applications and change behavior accordingly - But... it also means applications need a step to configure those settings at install time. Additionally - Windows is a MUCH more diverse ecosystem than macOS in terms of hardware (and the associated software). Installers give applications a chance to ensure all required dependencies are correctly in place. Finally - There's a lot of work and tooling for enterprise customers in Microsoft's MSI toolchain. Not the least of which - they can allow enterprise customers to verify the exact state changes on the end machine that will occur as a result of installation, and to do updates as patches rather than complete replacements, making them much faster and less network intensive (matters when you're deploying a patch to something like say Visual Studio, which is 40+GB on disk on the small end). Basically - Installation is a lot more complicated with a wide variety of business use-cases, much less hardware control, and a strong legacy of supporting old software.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    > Windows uses a single shared registry for persistent application settings (instead of something like a plist/config file local to the application) The NT Registry was intended for Kernel settings only. Persisting application settings to it was a bug that didn't get squashed early enough, in part because Windows 95 copied the idea without understanding the design/architecture/reasoning behind it. It is a bug that will live on "forever" for backwards compatibility.

by iKlsR 4y ago

pteraspidomorph 4y ago

Good old InstallShield. At one point it was everywhere, and then... it wasn't. I keep all the bundled installers I've ever had in a folder. Currently there are files there from 2009 onwards (older ones are archived somewhere). I didn't bother looking for the older ones, but running grep -a ether-rot-mutex quickly yielded a match containing the entire snippet! The culprit is the installer for Ulead (now Corel) PhotoImpact 12 and it has been there since 2010.

xyzzy123 4y ago
Installshield as a product had... (has?) absolutely incredible incidental complexity. It's really hard to communicate the scars, if you never dealt with it, you dodged a bullet. Under the next -> next -> finish you saw, was basically a fountain of tears. That software directly relished and consumed the salty tears of engineers. It demanded them as sacrifice, to make the installs keep happening. You would think that a product which did nothing but facilitate that workflow would hide, or somehow ease your pain but somehow it made it so that it never worked by default and it was your problem as "installer engineer" (aka short-straw-haver) to fix it.
- self_awareness 4y ago
  But it had to solve some original problem (while maybe introducing others). Otherwise it wouldn't be used? From user's POV, I've always preferred IS installers than Wise, but I haven't created any packages even once. I was always just the "next-next-finish"-type of user ;)
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    A cut down (but still very functional) version of Install Shield came bundled with Visual Studio, Delphi, C++ Builder and perhaps others (they were somewhat customized versions for each) so for many it was available out of the box. And the included version had a wizard to quickly create an installation project so unless you wanted something advanced, making an installer was a matter of selecting your program's files, the name of any Start menu shortcuts (and perhaps a couple of other things i forget) and then building the installer. For a ton of people it was more than enough. I think at the time its main "drawback" was that it made installer downloads from the internet a bit awkward since it generated tons of files, but many archiving tools (WinZip, WinRAR, etc) added options for making self-extracting archives that can launch applications, so the combo of a WinZip self-extracting archive that launches an InstallShield setup.exe was very common for a very long time. But basically the reason it was used a lot was that it was easily available to the users of the most popular development tools at the time.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjc50 4y ago
    It made you a standard executable Windows installer. Inexplicably there wasn't a decent first-party Microsoft solution to this until the Microsoft Store era. There wasn't really effective competition, probably because it's hard to get people to pay for developer tools and it's a hard problem to do well.
    - zokier 4y ago
      Umm.. MSI has been a thing since Windows 2000, and WiX (and native support in VS) for creating those.
- e40 4y ago
  Ah, yes, I remember it well. The day I jumped to NSIS was a good day.
  - eptcyka 4y ago
    Is NSIS really that much better?
    - e40 4y ago
      Yes, I think it is. But, it's not great. The pseudo assembler language is not great, but it was definitely easier for me to deal with, perhaps because there were lots of other people using it and sharing info.
- grishka 4y ago
  Probably a good thing that when I built a Windows app in 2010 and needed an installer for it, I used InnoSetup. It was surprisingly easy to get something decently working out of it. But yes, I remember that a lot of installers were InstallShield, and the thought that it might be a mess on the inside has never once crossed my mind.
  - DougN7 4y ago
    InnoSetup stills works great, and is still pretty easy to work with.
- octopoc 4y ago
  I never messed with InstallShield but I have used NSIS (free), Wix (free), and Advanced Installer (paid). Advanced Installer is absolutely worth it in my opinion, although it still has trouble hiding the nightmare of Windows installers. NSIS syntax is a cross between PHP and assembly. Wix is literally an attempt to program a database using XML. That's three things that don't fit together well. Part of the problem is that most Windows installers are based off MSIs, and MSIs were made for MS Office by some engineers who thought relational databases were cool, so they made everything in MSI be a relational table.
- PsylentKnight 4y ago
  My very first tasks as a new software developer were to revamp some legacy installers created with Installshield. It made me think that I chose the wrong career path. Just about everything I've worked on since then feels easy and painless compared to that.
honkdaddy 4y ago
13 years of installers.. That's some impressive digital pack-ratting! What's the idea? Just in case you ever need the installer again and it's no longer hosted online?
- thedanbob 4y ago
  You never know! Not the OP but I encountered a situation recently where my wife needed an old version of some software that was no longer available to download anywhere. (It pairs with an "smart" embroidery machine of hers.) Luckily I managed to find a copy of the installer in the temporary internet files directory of her old PC.
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  It's true that I don't trust the permanence of online resources, usually with good reason. But I can also be a bit of a digital hoarder. My IRC logs, for instance, go all the way back to 1999. It's funny because in meatspace I'm extremely tidy and don't keep any garbage. I have a single wardrobe with shelves of computer parts (mostly cables, wires and screws) and a few old CDs. I have nothing from before April 26, 1999, the date when the Chernobyl virus destroyed my hard drive and wiped out all of kid me's QBasic programs (what a loss for humankind). Kid me could not afford the storage space for backups, nor did he have the discipline anyway.

baisq 4y ago

I just checked the installer of GTA San Andreas and indeed there it is.

DANK_YACHT 4y ago

This got me thinking, why are installers still necessary on Windows? Why have they never adopted a packaged solution similar to .app on macOS?

horsawlarway 4y ago
Microsoft store applications are conceptually similar to the dmg/app approach macOS has taken (and have most of the same limitations and restrictions). A few design decisions from the early Windows days tend to keep installers around on windows, though. Windows uses a single shared registry for persistent application settings (instead of something like a plist/config file local to the application) which has some clear upsides because settings are centralized and can be deployed fairly easily by admins and applications can read settings for other applications and change behavior accordingly - But... it also means applications need a step to configure those settings at install time. Additionally - Windows is a MUCH more diverse ecosystem than macOS in terms of hardware (and the associated software). Installers give applications a chance to ensure all required dependencies are correctly in place. Finally - There's a lot of work and tooling for enterprise customers in Microsoft's MSI toolchain. Not the least of which - they can allow enterprise customers to verify the exact state changes on the end machine that will occur as a result of installation, and to do updates as patches rather than complete replacements, making them much faster and less network intensive (matters when you're deploying a patch to something like say Visual Studio, which is 40+GB on disk on the small end). Basically - Installation is a lot more complicated with a wide variety of business use-cases, much less hardware control, and a strong legacy of supporting old software.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  > Windows uses a single shared registry for persistent application settings (instead of something like a plist/config file local to the application) The NT Registry was intended for Kernel settings only. Persisting application settings to it was a bug that didn't get squashed early enough, in part because Windows 95 copied the idea without understanding the design/architecture/reasoning behind it. It is a bug that will live on "forever" for backwards compatibility.