DIYEFI.org Forum

I am going to start making available binaries for EMSLoad, an alternative to MTXLoader and FreeEMS-Loader, and I would like some feedback from the community on what I should do with the installer.

I have two options, I can either have two installers, released side by side which install to different folders with different start menu folder entries, or have one installer which has options to install both to the same folder with shortcuts a single folder in the start menu.

I'm leaning towards the latter, just having one core installer than will install one or both applications depending on the users needs. EMSTune's installer is 12 megs, EMSLoad's installer is 6 megs, together they would be under 13 megs, so it would be a savings of disk space and bandwidth on both the server, and the users side to combine them.

What do you all think?

The overlap is all of the dlls that are bundled, right? no way of splitting that into a third path where they can both access it? if not, I'd go both, too. Or maybe (seems pointless) three, two independent, one combined, and promote the latter.

That's correct, the bundled DLL's are most of the size. Some applications install libraries into the system32 folder, but I feel that's bad practice.

Doing three, one for each, and one combined wouldn't be terrible to maintain, it's just an extra installer generator script.

I agree with your sentiments re system32 folder, however what about an EMStudio-shared folder, and something that touches a lib-versions file or similar?

The options are:
* Install libs to windows folder
* Install libs to system32 folder,
* Have the shortcut include the necessary information to allow windows to load the libraries from a different folder (if you ran the executable directly it would fail)
* Add the "EMStudio-Libs" installed folder to the system PATH variable

Windows is intended for applications to bring their own dll's with them, and keep their own copies.