Reducing the size of an installer (best practice?)
Hi,
My project installs postgres, our own internal code and other 3rd party apps. I've just used "Add Files" for the postgres Linux rpms and Windows zip (postgres msi installer) and the installer size is now 88Mb. I still need to add more files and am afraid the installer will grow beyond a manageable size.
What is a good/best practice for projects that require many large files (zips, rpms, msi, etc)?
Any additional best practice when there are many rpms that are all considered "Linux" yet are actually different (rhel vs sles)?
In my case, I find I must include ALL the PostgreSQL rpms (rhel4, rhel5, sles9, sles10 for i386, x84_64, and ia) and Windows installer. I believe ALL of these Added Files are bundled with the installer and extracted at run/install time depending on Platform and architecture rules.
I haven't even added our internal application files nor the java zips. Yikes!
FYI, currently our Windows installers are 100 & 170 MB in size, whereas their Unix counterparts are 130 and 200 MB in size. And I still find them manageable. I guess that in our case a big difference was made when we switched to Java 1.5: the VM pack have increased tremendously from 1.4 (sometimes doubled in size): so for instance around 40 MB are taken by the VM packs alone! So I wonder have you bundled any VM in your installer yet? Anyway in order to reduce installers sizes you go in the Build section, Distribution tab and then check Optimize Installer Size by Platform.
