Full version and Minor Update

[LanceRas]

Currently past practice has been a single exe basic MSI project installer. The Windows Installer is payloaded in.

I don't want to deal with patches and such, so I've been just incrementing the version of the IS project, building and distributing and all seems good for getting updates out.

What I would like to do is reduce the weight of the installer for those who are updating.

Can you see anything wrong with this theory?

Release A will be called PROJECTINSTALL.EXE and will be a single EXE with Windows Installer built in so they can install everything needed.

Release B will be called PROJECTUPDATE.EXE and will be identical to Release A, except it will not include the Windows installers.

A customer can choose either install at will, unless the customer does not have the rerequisite Windows Installer, to which they would either need to use Release A... Or install Windows Installer from Microsoft directly.

This will create a 4-5 meg difference in file sizes. Plus once installed, theres no need to keep wasting this amount of download time (yes... I still have lots of dialup customers).

Is there going to be any confusion anywhere?

Lance

[richardh]

Is there any reason why you don't mark the Windows Installers as "Download from the web", rather than include them ?

That way there's only one code stream to maintain and they either download it themselves or not, as may be.

[LanceRas]

I have situations (several) where the installer is downloaded and moved to a non-Internet computer.

[Stefan_Krueger]

I don't see a problem in your approach, as long as the inside MSIs are the same (including their names) and just the wrapper changes.

[LanceRas]

I had named the inner MSI's differently, so there was a "bad" thing.

So now inner MSI's are the same. SETUP.EXE wrappers are named differently.

Thanks!