CVS Install

This page contains various ideas for how a CVS installation program might want to work. This is especially for Windows, although some of these issues would apply more generally.

• Should non-linux installs be based on RPM somehow? (Maybe not, that sounds like more generality and hair than we need. Maybe so, RPM is pretty nifty and especially if there are lots and lots of packages, it might be handy).
• For Windows, see Inside the Windows 95 Registry for various stuff on this (e.g. pages 325ff), although it isn't clear to me how much of that applies to the command line as well as the Windows GUI. Probably also should provide manual installation instructions for users who prefer that (no fears about what is this install program going to do to my system, and we *know* this works on NT3.51, NT4.0, &c). And if there is an install program, there should be an uninstall program.
• The install program needs to do something about versions of CVS which are already on the system when install runs (if not, would lose if they were ahead of CVS on the PATH).
• Noel says there are free InstallShield-like programs which can help (this may be better than trying to start from scratch) (we looked for some, and didn't find much).
• The install should prompt people for where they want to put the CVS repository and whether to create a new one or use an existing one. In the former case, run "cvs init". In the latter case, check to see whether it seems to have been written by CVS 1.3 or later (CVSROOT not CVSROOT.adm), and whether it passes a few sanity checks (similar to the ones at the start of "main", perhaps). IMHO, should _not_ run "cvs init" on existing repositories. Sure it works, but the purpose of install should be to upgrade your CVS, not reconfigure your repository. Then we should edit autoexec.bat to set CVSROOT, or some equivalent mechanism. (Actually, this quite possibly should be some program that gets run after the install, rather than during it).
• The install should perhaps segue into some kind of getting started kind of thing analogous to the "cvs import" and friends in INSTALL or the README from cvs-1.9-win.zip. Not completely sure how to handle this.
• Need to think about how to test this (some kind of beta test period where we release it to the net and solicit bug reports, presumably).
• Presumably want to keep the manual installation instructions from README in the Windows distribution somewhere. Hacker types will presumably be more comfortable with them, and they might sometimes work when the install program fails (and vice versa).