Innosetup

Inno Setup Revisited
product review by Craig Murphy
I last wrote about Inno Setup by Jordan Russell (http://www.jrsoftware.org/) in the Sept/Oct 2002 issue of this fine publication. The review itself was called “Creating professional installation using Inno Setup”. Now, you may be wondering why, some two years later (almost), I find myself reviewing it again? Well, I took delivery of a newlaptop a couple of months ago – last week I had to make some minor modifications to an application and its associated setup.exe. Naturally, I installed Delphi 6 and a few select components, such that I could re-build all my applications. However, I had forgotten to install Inno Setup, so I could not build the application’s setup.exe. I had been following the Inno Setup versioning, having moved thesaid application from Inno Setup 2.x through to Inno Setup 3.x. In July 2003, Inno Setup 4.x appeared. Like most of us, I’m sure, I kept using Inno Setup 3.x, because it worked – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, March 2004 saw the arrival of a new laptop and with it a new operating system. Call me reckless; I put caution to the wind and installed Inno Setup 4.x. Apart from making building anapplication’s setup.exe really easy, Inno Setup 4.x has some excellent “new” features, such as the inclusion of Pascal-script (http://www.remobjects.com/?ps). It’s this feature that I would like to spend some time looking at, hence Inno Setup Revisited. I’ll also be looking at some of the third party tool support for Inno Setup – I won’t cover them in too much detail as I’m saving that for asubsequent article/review.

Introduction
There are many excellent commercial installers available, however sometimes their price tag, whilst well worth the investment, can be too much for the lone developer or the small software house. If you cannot afford the commercial offerings, you have three options. Firstly, you could develop your own – this adds a one-off time/cost to your project and mayrequire projectby-project customisations. You would have to design, develop, test, debug, re-test, etc. Suddenly, what started out as small project, becomes a complete project in its own right. After all, most of us have a hard enough time writing the application that we’re trying to distribute via the installer! So, this is probably not the most viable option. Secondly, you could just bundle allthe files that your applications require on to a CD and then prepare a complicated “crib sheet” that contains the instructions required to perform an installation. This is potentially fraught with danger – for example, what if the machine that you are installing your application onto already has a newer version of a particular DLL? Do you overwrite it? Do you ask the user? Do you simply ignore it?These scenarios have to be catered for and catering for them on an application-by-application basis will prove to be a time-consuming process. Thirdly, you could opt to use a free/shareware installer. There are many of these available from the various freeware/shareware Internet sites. However, personally speaking, I find that freeware/shareware written using our tools (Delphi, CBuilder, etc.) tobe of better quality and usefulness than the freeware/shareware that has been written use other major development environments – they always seem to lack something. To that end, I use a freeware product called Inno Setup. However, since I have already reviewed Inno Setup (as has fellow DGer, Rob Bracken: The Delphi Magazine, Issue 99, November 2003), I will concentrate on the newer features andwill touch on the supporting tools. On a related note, this month’s Grey Matter HardCopy magazine, Issue 24, June 2004, covers some of the commercial application installers.

Inno Setup
Inno Setup is a freeware product that is free for personal and commercial use – it’s even supplied with full source code. Jordan Russell developed the tool itself, with assistance from Martijn Laan. It has been...