Hi, Team,
In our release readiness call earlier this week, I opined that I
did not feel the Oomph-based Papyrus-RT Installer was ready for
prime time. However, since then, several further developments
have occurred:
- Ed Merks fixed our most significant issues with customization
of window title, icon, and menu action branding for Papyrus-RT in
the Eclipse Installer (in the Oomph project)
- I implemented signing of the Mac installer RCP to satisfy the
MacOS Gatekeeper
- I implemented creation of the self-extracting executable
installer for Windows platform, also signed with the Eclipse
Foundation certificate
I also determined that the problems I was seeing with the Mac
installer showing no information in the About dialog and wanting an
unnecessary software self-update were caused by the new App
Translocation feature in the MacOS Sierra version of the
Gatekeeper. This affects all self-updating software
(including native apps using frameworks like Sparkle) and, of
course, all EPPs and other RCPs provided by Eclipse. And it
is easily evaded after download anyways. Therefore, this in
no way hinders any publication of this installer.
So, I think now the installer is ready for general use, but of
course it won’t have the 0.8 Papyrus-RT release yet in its
catalogue because that doesn’t exist. It does, however, have
the 0.7.x releases and seems to be able to install them.
To take the installer for a spin, download the variant
appropriate to your platform from
A word of caution: try to avert your eyes from the
installer app icon. I hacked it together, myself, and it is
hideous. I am no artist.
Note also that the Windows installer binary currently shows
the Eclipse Installer icon, not the Papyrus-RT installer, in the
Windows Explorer. This is because so far we are re-using the
extractor binary from the Eclipse Installer and it isn’t worth
trying to figure out how to replace it until we have a good
icon.
If we are interested in promoting this installer as a
distribution method for the 0.8 release, then I should note that it
is currently built on pre-release nightlies of the Oomph installer
framework because the latest release does not provide the
customizability that we need (neither in branding nor managing
custom indices). So we should understand that this isn’t a
“release build” of the installer and I don’t know when the next
Eclipse Installer release will be on which we can base a “release”
of our installer.
