2 ms·

InstallShield was a created by a startup, to give windows-apps a non-insane way of installing themselves. Microsoft was forced to buy them, almost at gunpoint,

by phkamp 14y ago

InstallShield was a created by a startup, to give windows-apps a non-insane way of installing themselves. Microsoft was forced to buy them, almost at gunpoint, by 3rd. party software developers.

peterwwillis 14y ago
Cool. Now if only FOSS would adopt a non-insane way of installing software...
- phkamp 14y ago
  100% agreement from here. Andoids idea of a uid per app is a good place to start.
  - snprbob86 14y ago
    Part of me wonders if git provides a hint here... What about a sha1 hash per app?
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  You mean like by having package managers that are built into the OS distribution that can install the applications you want with a single command?
  - peterwwillis 14y ago
    That's not a software installer. That's a distribution-specific package manager. Huge difference. Commercial software for Linux typically does not come as a package. It starts with some kind of shell script and shoves itself into a corner of the filesystem (usually /opt/$PRODUCT/), and generally ships all its dependencies and does the work of mangling init to work on whatever distribution it's being shoehorned into. If it's a particularly expensive product it might have a GUI or ncurses installer or configuration wizard. That's retarded, but it's still better than having a half dozen independent binary formats and a hundred distribution-specific packages. If distribution managers would stop being asshats they would all agree on a set of APIs that they could support to perform operations in a platform-agnostic way, and software developers could in a free-market way make installer tools that work with the API. So you could have a shitty Gnome installer, a shitty KDE installer, a shitty ncurses installer, and an installer that uses Java just for the hell of it. Packages are not things which users should ever have to touch. They are a specific collection of meta-information for the operating system to do mediocre actions like removing files, copying files, understanding if it has everything it needs to run some files, and telling you what the hell is installed. Packages certainly are not intended to hold a user's hand or provide all dependencies in and of themselves. But that's what you need if you want your users to be able to just install the damn software. Solaris DStream packages have this wonderful ability to contain multiple packages in themselves, so you can install one or more select packages, or all of them if you need to. The easiest way to ship your application is to provide all the dependent packages in the DStream, and if you need one, you install it. This works great for Solaris (even if you have a bunch of different Solaris versions), but would be completely impractical for Linux because there's so many damn Linux distributions even if they have the same binary package format. Most Linux software out there (assuming the kernel version is right and the glibc ABI hasn't changed) will work on other Linux distributions without code changes. But we waste all this time just making it work on other distros after the code has been compiled! Does that seem right to you? That because distributions want to live in a silo and do things their own way, you have to spend hours (or days) finicking with independent distributions just to release a new minor version of your app that everyone can use? For a bunch of really smart people we end up doing some stupid things.
    - jeremyjh 14y ago
      Commercial software can be distributed through the package managers, though you do have to tell the users to add archive sources for those or they have to provide those packages. We do see some of this being done. One thing its useful to keep in mind, is that the different parent distributions are more-or-less different operating systems. They don't have differences because they are special snowflakes. Comparing the deployment story for trying to write a package compatible with every Linux distribution to Windows 32-bit applications is not really apples to apples.
- acdha 14y ago
  "apt-get install <name of package>" is about as good as software installation gets
  - peterwwillis 14y ago
    Actually there's much better, but none that are freely available. And it's still distribution-specific which is retarded.
csears 14y ago
I don't think they were ever acquired by Microsoft. Perhaps you're thinking of Macrovision. They've gone through several company names and changes in ownership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallShield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallShield
me_again 14y ago
A minor point, but this is wrong in several ways. InstallShield was never acquired by Microsoft, and was never actually very good. You can think of it as being a leaky abstraction over the underlying horror of Windows Installer, allowing just enough to poke through that it was unreliable. There has never been a really sane way to install windows apps, and there still isn't - the closest approximation today is WiX. Possibly the manifest-based Windows 8 application packages provide a better story, I'm not familiar enough to say.

by phkamp 14y ago

InstallShield was a created by a startup, to give windows-apps a non-insane way of installing themselves. Microsoft was forced to buy them, almost at gunpoint, by 3rd. party software developers.

peterwwillis 14y ago

Cool. Now if only FOSS would adopt a non-insane way of installing software...

phkamp 14y ago
100% agreement from here. Andoids idea of a uid per app is a good place to start.
- snprbob86 14y ago
  Part of me wonders if git provides a hint here... What about a sha1 hash per app?
jeremyjh 14y ago
You mean like by having package managers that are built into the OS distribution that can install the applications you want with a single command?
- peterwwillis 14y ago
  That's not a software installer. That's a distribution-specific package manager. Huge difference. Commercial software for Linux typically does not come as a package. It starts with some kind of shell script and shoves itself into a corner of the filesystem (usually /opt/$PRODUCT/), and generally ships all its dependencies and does the work of mangling init to work on whatever distribution it's being shoehorned into. If it's a particularly expensive product it might have a GUI or ncurses installer or configuration wizard. That's retarded, but it's still better than having a half dozen independent binary formats and a hundred distribution-specific packages. If distribution managers would stop being asshats they would all agree on a set of APIs that they could support to perform operations in a platform-agnostic way, and software developers could in a free-market way make installer tools that work with the API. So you could have a shitty Gnome installer, a shitty KDE installer, a shitty ncurses installer, and an installer that uses Java just for the hell of it. Packages are not things which users should ever have to touch. They are a specific collection of meta-information for the operating system to do mediocre actions like removing files, copying files, understanding if it has everything it needs to run some files, and telling you what the hell is installed. Packages certainly are not intended to hold a user's hand or provide all dependencies in and of themselves. But that's what you need if you want your users to be able to just install the damn software. Solaris DStream packages have this wonderful ability to contain multiple packages in themselves, so you can install one or more select packages, or all of them if you need to. The easiest way to ship your application is to provide all the dependent packages in the DStream, and if you need one, you install it. This works great for Solaris (even if you have a bunch of different Solaris versions), but would be completely impractical for Linux because there's so many damn Linux distributions even if they have the same binary package format. Most Linux software out there (assuming the kernel version is right and the glibc ABI hasn't changed) will work on other Linux distributions without code changes. But we waste all this time just making it work on other distros after the code has been compiled! Does that seem right to you? That because distributions want to live in a silo and do things their own way, you have to spend hours (or days) finicking with independent distributions just to release a new minor version of your app that everyone can use? For a bunch of really smart people we end up doing some stupid things.
  - jeremyjh 14y ago
    Commercial software can be distributed through the package managers, though you do have to tell the users to add archive sources for those or they have to provide those packages. We do see some of this being done. One thing its useful to keep in mind, is that the different parent distributions are more-or-less different operating systems. They don't have differences because they are special snowflakes. Comparing the deployment story for trying to write a package compatible with every Linux distribution to Windows 32-bit applications is not really apples to apples.
acdha 14y ago
"apt-get install <name of package>" is about as good as software installation gets
- peterwwillis 14y ago
  Actually there's much better, but none that are freely available. And it's still distribution-specific which is retarded.

csears 14y ago

I don't think they were ever acquired by Microsoft. Perhaps you're thinking of Macrovision. They've gone through several company names and changes in ownership: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallShield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InstallShield

me_again 14y ago

A minor point, but this is wrong in several ways. InstallShield was never acquired by Microsoft, and was never actually very good. You can think of it as being a leaky abstraction over the underlying horror of Windows Installer, allowing just enough to poke through that it was unreliable. There has never been a really sane way to install windows apps, and there still isn't - the closest approximation today is WiX. Possibly the manifest-based Windows 8 application packages provide a better story, I'm not familiar enough to say.