Nixstaller 0.1.1 review

Nixstaller project can easily make installers for Unix-like systems. Here are some key features of "Nixstaller": · Can be transla

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Rick

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Nixstaller project can easily make installers for Unix-like systems.

Here are some key features of "Nixstaller":
Can be translated(no UTF yet). Dutch and English translations are supplied by default
Screen where the user can choose the language
Optional intro screen with customizable image and text
Optional screen where a user have to accept a license agreement
Optional screen where the user has to select a destination directory
Optional screen where the user can set parameters used by installation commands
Installation progress screen
Optional screen which appears when the installation is done

Nixstaller can be fully translated and is programmed in C++ and sh.

Configuration:

Ofcourse can nixstaller be configured;
Can use either gzip or bzip2 to compress the files
You can specify which frontends you want to be included
A way to specify which frontends for which Operating Systems should be included
Extraction directory can be specified: Specified by the user, to a default directory(IE for binaries), temporary(IE for compiling the package)
A way to specify any shell commands that will be executed after the files are extracted. You can also specify the used parameters for each command(IE --prefix for './configure') so that the user can configure them before the installation begins. This feature is especially handy for compiling a package on the user's system.

How it works:

When creating the installer a self extractable archive will be created (powered by makeself). The only thing the user has to do is running this script, it then will do:
Extract some required files for the graphical frontends(configuration file, translations, archive containing the files to be installed(this is not extracted before installation) etc). Default the files will go in a subdirectory on /tmp.
Search for the right frontend(depending on which are included, if X is running etc).
Launch this frontend.
Clean the files used by the installer.

Requirements:
Additional libraries used by the frontends(such as ncurses, CDK, FLTK etc) are all linked statically. Some system libraries(libm, libc) or the X libraries are kept dynamic, since some functions need runtime support and these libraries don't change that often anyway.
This simply means that the end user hardly needs to worry about any dependencies.
Note that it's possible to supply different binaries for different OSes/architectures/libc's.

What's New in This Release:
Two bugs were fixed.
First, the ncurses frontend would crash if only one language was available.
Second, geninstall.sh couldn't detect the current directory with older version of ksh.
Norwegian translations were added.