O Blog do Gustavo Felisberto

Yesterday I received the monthly SF newsletter. It’s quite a long one, but I usually look at the Project Of The Month and the Top 25 projects to see if there’s any major news.

This month’s Project Of The Month is a very useful thing called NSIS - Nullsoft Scriptable Install System and it’s used to create Windows Installers, a task nothing short of impossible if you try to create one from scratch. Microsoft apparently thought that putting a relational database behind every Installer was a good thing…

I still haven’t investigated deep into it but the philosophy is simply:

- write a script in their custom-defined scripting language

- use a compiler called MakeNSIS to compile the script and generate the installer

The fact that there is a custom scripting language implies a learning curve, but considering the alternatives it seems like a very good tool. And Open Source, too. I wish I’d come by it two years ago when I was trying to create a neat installer/uninstaller (unsuccessful in the end).

It’s already being used by popular software like Winamp, eMule, 3DNA and, of course, NSIS for the creation of their installers.

Go right in.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 11:15 am and is filed under Ciência/Tecnologia.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.