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.
_______________________________________________