Windows installer

[Rod Widdowson]

> Can you be more clear about what the issues are with the mashup you're
> referring to? Do you mean you want the distribution itself to be
> integrated with the MSI more tightly instead of having the MSI run two
> separate installers?

It's purely the mechanics.  Before I grow a QuickInstall I need to 

1) Unpack the IdP distribution
2) Overlay the distribution with (suitably changed) configuration files
3) Unpack the latest Tomcat distribution with an admin install
4) Eyeball these distributions against the previous versions to see if any
file names have changed.
5) Make changes into the nasty MSI editor we use
6) Try to build, discover what I got wrong with (4), swear and repeat from 4

None of this is rocket science and indeed if we were using wix I could
semi-automate a lot by careful use of the 'heat' tool (which converts .reg
files and directory trees into .wxs files).

But I want to go for the most automated, seamless solution possible.  I
suspect that some use of 'heat' will be required since the precise file
names that maven will bring in will change for each release.  

What I want most of all to avoid is the potential to get stage (4) wrong -
it is very tedious and error prone.  Using WiX will certainly make it less
so.

> I think we want to pursue embedding Jetty for this version and use that
> as a proving ground for doing it more generally. At least that would be
> my take.

That would be my hope as well.  I'll note that (AFAIR) I have never seen a
Tomcat question about the quick installer in the user list since we started
packaging up a Tomcat - the kind of people who use this have not been the
sort to poke under the covers and will happily take a mandatory default.

My intention is to build a merge module for Jetty and to (try to) contribute
the mechanics for building it back to that project.  We might also need to
do the same for the service installation (Jetty currently recommend using
the Apache one).

We can then build the IdP Installer from these merge modules and our own
stuff.  We could use the same VBscript that the SP installer uses to copy
files from the dist directory up (which I'm guessing might fix the CRLF
issue). 

Rod