raptor/notes/raptor_installers_scriptable.txt

Making the Raptor installers scriptable
---------------------------------------

In order to improve testing of the packaging of Raptor, the Raptor installers 
need to be able to run unattended in "silent" mode.

Windows installer
-----------------

Some small changes were required to the NSIS code to enable this. 
Specifically, the installer had to be able to detect the installation type,
that is whether to set the system path, the user path, or to not update the 
environment at all.

The installer can now be run in silent mode like this:

sbs-2.XX.YY.exe /S /INSTALL_TYPE=NO_ENV /D=C:\APPS\Raptor

Explanation of the flags:

/S run in silent mode
/INSTALL_TYPE installation type: valid values are
              NO_ENV - do not set the PATH
              USR - add Raptor's bin directory to the current user's PATH
              SYS - add Raptor's bin directory to the system PATH (all users)
              This is case sensitive and anything else is an error.
/D installation directory: does not have to exist, but must be a valid 
   directory name.

*N.B.*: due to a parsing oddity in NSIS installers, the /D flag must come last 
otherwise everything following it is used as the installation directory name.

When run from a command prompt (in silent mode or not), sbs-2.XX.YY.exe is 
launched as a separate process, as it is not a console application. Therefore, 
the best way to monitor progress of the installer in silent mode is to run it 
via Python's subprocess.Popen API with shell=False, and to wait on the process 
to exit. The exit code can also be obtained in this way.

Running in interactive/GUI mode continues to function as before.

Linux installer
---------------

The Linux installer is created using the makeself.sh script, which packages a 
shell script and tar archive into a single .run file. The .run file unpacks 
the tar archive and can then runs a shell script that is embedded in the 
archive. In the case of Raptor, the embedded script is bin/install_raptor.sh. 
The double-dash, --, passes following arguments to the embedded script.

Small changes were required to the install_raptor.sh script. As for the 
Windows installer, the installation directory has to be specified; in addition 
the script can be run in "silent" mode, i.e. in a non-interactive mode.

The installer can now be run in silent mode like this:

./sbs-2.XX.YY-linux-ARCH-libc2_ZZ.run -- -s -i /my/installation/dir/for/raptor

As the .run file is itself a script, the double-dash, --, is required to pass 
the "-s -i /my/installation/dir/for/raptor" to the embedded script.

Explanation of the flags:

-s run in silent mode
-i installation directory; if missing or not given a value the script exits
   with an error. If used without -s, -i is ignored.

Running in interactive mode continues to function as before and uses the 
dialog utility.