Simplify windows installation

[cookacounty]

Not an issue, more of a feature request.

I would like to distribute git-cola at my workplace but unfortunately it requires installing quite a few dependencies. Could all of these be packaged into one exe?

[davvid]

sorry that I don't have a solution right now, but it looks like https://chocolatey.org/ is probably the answer.

I don't have a windows machine to test with, so I don't have an environment for authoring choclatey packages, but I'll leave this issue open in case someone wants to give it a go.

They've already packaged Git and Python, so it looks like it'd be be a simple matter of authoring PyQt4 and git-cola packages.

[takluyver]

For another approach, my project Pynsist can easily make an installer that includes Python and PyQt. It's also possible to build Windows installers from Linux, which I don't think is possible using Inno Setup.

Bundling git into the installer would be a bit more work, but it should be possible. And even if git was still separate, that's two installers for the user to run instead of four.

[davvid]

That sounds like a great idea. I have no attachment whatsoever to current windows deployment setup. It was basically cobbled together from other projects, and since I'm not a windows user, I'm not really dogfooding that part. I just happen to have a crazy old win2k vm that works so I use it to create installers.

Yeah, the current windows deployment setup needs some work ;-) that's not really my area of expertise so I'm always happy to merge patches from people that know more about this stuff than me.

I also hate how I have to touch the nsis scripts to add a subdir every time a new python subdir is added to the code; if pynsist can eliminate that manual step then I'm sold!

[takluyver]

Yep, pynsist should make that easy. :-) When I'm back in my office tomorrow, where I have a Windows 7 VM to test things on, I'll have a go at making an installer for git-cola.

In the meantime, here's the config file I use for Pynsist with another PyQt4 GUI application I've worked on. There's an extra step to download and unpack a Windows build of PyQt4 (described here) - that could be automated if I can work around Sourceforge's download system.

[takluyver]

See #421 for a rough idea of what is involved in using Pynsist.

[c-geek]

Here is a free project of us which is python and bundles automatically for Windows using AppVeyor: https://github.com/duniter/sakia

We even just added InnoSetup installer, so everything is working out-of-the-box without any third party installation.

Maybe this can help you.

P.S.: I am really fond of git-cola, hope we can use it easily on Windows in a near future!

[davvid]

I believe this has been resolved already (we're happily using pynsist these days). The next major release is going to support pip install git-cola as well (we have an early alpha on pypi already, and you can do pip install . as well so I think this should be a non-issue these days.

Thanks again @takluyver

Sorry if there's some aspect we missed.