|
I do not know why those runtimes were missing, but they were. Installer gave misleadign error messages "access denied". That's how it was.
WiX can create EXE not only MSIs? din't knew. Though it was NSIS or Inno. ZIP-kits really do have DLLs (but not MSIs) inside. I am not sure about EXE-installers. I cannot alas unpack Firebird-2.5.1.26351_1_x64.exe and look inside and see if DLLs and MSIs present and not wiped out due to some error. But if it present, then it is neither unpacked into Program Files nor installed as MSI. If installer cannot check for runtimes installed - then why not to try installing them for safety? Let MSIs themselves determine if there is need for installation. The situation was: 1. Win7 x64 box having no system-wide msvc 8.0 runtimes at moment of FB installation. At least not 64-bit ones required by instXXX. 2. Installer saw no problems on system and proceeded to go. 3. Installer then been unable to engage instXXX tools, throwing "access denied" errors. 4. Installer failed to detect problem with installation and suggest fixes 5. Installer did not unpacked/installed the runtimes, it supposedly had within. 6. After runtimes were manually searched for, downloaded and executed, installation was successful. Hence - if installer runned the VC RT installers itself (supposing it had them built-in) - installation would be successful since the beginning. Not speaking of instXXX error messages such confusing. |
And W7 should come with the correct assemblies for the MS VC runtimes so Firebird 2.5 should just work, even if installed from the zip kit. It has certainly been tested in the past.
The required runtime libraries are a part of the installer. In any case, the installer deploys the MS VC runtimes via msi if the O/S uses assemblies, otherwise it deploys dll's to the system32 dir (but I guess not many people use W2K or Win9n these days.)
The uninstaller does not uninstall the msvc runtimes.
The only thing the installer cannot do is to check if the required assemblies are already installed. This is either due to a limitation in Wix, or a lack of documentation in Wix. This can add some unnecessary seconds to the installation process but is a fairly minor annoyance.