[Gretl-devel] Installation on Windows

[Sven Schreiber]

Am 22.12.2007 16:28, Allin Cottrell schrieb:
> Thoughts based on some quick research.
> 
> When the gretl installer is being run on Windows there are three 
> main cases to consider:
> 
> 1. gretl is being installed by someone who has admin (or at least 
> "power user") rights, and this person will also be using gretl.
> I believe that's the most likely case, at least in the American 
> academic sphere, and in this case what we do currently is fine.

Yes.

> 
> 2. gretl is being installed by an admin user, on behalf of someone 
> else who doesn't have admin rights but who will actually use the 
> progam.  In this case the install should go OK, though as Sven 
> points out it will redundantly create a gretl userdir tree for 
> the admin user.  When the ordinary user runs the program there may 
> be some permissions issues on saving settings.  This should be 
> fixable without too much difficulty.

Great. As I said, the scenario with one person acting both as admin for 
the install and as a normal user for normal work is maybe not that 
widespread, but it's the way it _should_ be done. (And the world would 
be a better place with much less malware floating around ... :-)

> 
> 3. An unprivileged user is trying to install gretl on their own 
> account.  This will fail at present.  It's possible we could set 
> things up so that it'll work: don't install gretl into 
> PROGRAMFILES but into a per-user directory; don't attempt to write 
> registry keys under "Local Machine", only "Current User".
> 
> MSDN says:
> 
> "During setup your application should check to see whether the 
> application is being installed by a user account having the 
> privileges to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. If your setup is not 
> run by a user with write permissions to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, the 
> application should notify the user with a message such as, "You 
> are not allowed to install this application for all users on this 
> machine; do you want to install this application for personal 
> use?" All users should be able to install an application for their 
> own use."
> 
> Conversely, if the user does have admin status we could ask: "You 
> are installing gretl as an administrator; will you be using the 
> program yourself?" -- and create a userdir tree only if the answer 
> to that is Yes.
> 
> I'm not sure yet how much of this can be done with the current 
> version of Inno Setup, but I'm trying to figure that out.

Wow, that would be the luxury version of installation -- actually I 
think that would go in the direction of using gretl w/o actually 
installing it.  Think portable gretl on a USB stick. As I said, I'm not 
sure it's worth your effort and I'm certainly not asking for it, but it 
sure would be cool...

-sven (writing too many gretl emails today)