More a question than a hack...

[kovidgoyal]

No, use that version.

And another problem is that you have to somehow convince windows that the nsis installer based calibre isntall is an upgrade of the .msi based one, otherwise the user will end up with two entries in add/remove programs.

[ymerejo42]

OK. I see one way of doing the C runtimes, I can have the installer throw it in their temp folder, install it if necessary, then delete it from there before it exits. I was wanting to have it download the installer if necessary, but not sure if that would work well.

The upgrade issue shouldn't be too horrible, as long as it uses the same reg keys, then it should replace whatever the .msi installer did. I'll test it on my system, though.

[kovidgoyal]

It might actually be possible to install that runtime as a private assembly in the calibre installation folder. I'll look into that later today.

[ymerejo42]

That actually might be even better, since that really would make calibre self-contained. Heck, that might even qualify as making it portable, I'd love to have it so that I could copy it plus my library to a USB key and take them with me wherever I go.

[kovidgoyal]

Well, I spent 5 hours on this crap, I could get the loader to load the assembly from the application folder but as soon as it loads msvcr90.dll it crashes.

And Microsoft, being the brilliant, helpful darlings that they are, released a service pack for VS 2008 which means that there seems to be no way to get debug symbols for these DLLs, since they have been superseded.

You may well ask why not use the newer dlls, the reason being that you have to have the exact version if you are trying to load from a private assembly.

I've attached the dlls to this post, just unzip into the calibre dir on a "clean" windows and see the crash for yourself. If you can figure out how to get them to work, great, otherwise lets shelve this project until python is released compiled with VS 2010 and I can switch to using it.

[ymerejo42]

Hmmm... Reading up on another website, it says you actually need 9 files. Here's the link.

[kovidgoyal]

calibre doesn't use MFC so I don't see why they would be needed.

[ymerejo42]

Oh, OK. I just wasn't sure, I'm not much of a programmer.

[kovidgoyal]

I think I found a way to make it work, it involves writing a replacement for the Microsoft DLL loading functions. Just the kind of challenge I enjoy

But it will take a while, as calibre has *a lot* of dependencies and getting them all to play ball may be tricky, even impossible.

At least the hard work of decoding the DLL file format has been done: https://github.com/fancycode/MemoryModule

[kovidgoyal]

I got it working (next release) and while there I also reduced the number of individual (unzipped) files in the windows build of calibre by 50% which should speed up the installer significantly.

[ymerejo42]

Sweet. I'll be looking for it, then I'll see about finishing the NSIS version of the installer.

[kovidgoyal]

Don't bother, with the reduction in the number of files, the msi is fast enough now.

[ymerejo42]

I'd still be willing to make the alternate installer if you're willing, since the .msi one still pauses for like 20 seconds while "computing required space". Not sure what that's for, it should know how much is needed versus how much is available without taking anywhere near that long. Also, from the test copies I'd made, it looks like the NSIS installer will be smaller, so that would save you some bandwidth when people download it. Also, yes, I will make sure there's an active checkbox on the GPL page.

[kovidgoyal]

I'd rather not. Switching installer techs is a big undertaking, as there are lots of little corner cases that could break. 20 seconds I am willing to live with (incidentally it takes about 5 seconds on my windows VM).