Get Iplayer for Windows

[dinkypumpkin]

On 13/08/2011 13:22, Jon Davies wrote:
> I started to look at building a fresh install package for Windows, and
> started down the road of building the dependencies for windows first,
> hence the new build of AtomicParsley.

Thanks again for that AP build.  If definitely plugs a gap.  MP3 tagging 
can be done well enough in Perl, but none of the MP4 Perl solutions 
proved to be reliable enough, and Sourceforge downloads are problematic 
for the installer.

> The thing I was scratching my head about and wondering how best to
> solve was the eternal problem of updating things for windows.  For
> Ubuntu, it's easy - I just maintain a package archive and it just
> works.  for windows I contemplated building something separate to do
> the updates, but then I changed jobs and started to work for a living
> and ran out of time.

This touches on a thorny question vis-a-vis a get_iplayer Windows 
installer: should it be dynamic and net-based, or standalone?  As I've 
mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there already is infrastructure at 
infradead.org for servicing updates of get_iplayer, its dependencies, 
and the Windows installer.  The current installer doesn't make full use 
of it, but I think I've managed to fix most of that.

The alternative is to make a get_iplayer installer more like a desktop 
application installer and bundle all the dependencies, scripts, etc. in 
the installer package.  This is more like Sparkle on OSX and similar 
systems.  The notion has some appeal because it gives more control over 
the installation.  OTOH, it probably means you have build more versions 
of the installer, so somebody would need to own the process and the 
update mechanism.

> I'm happy to help maintain the windows version (though I don't use
> get_iplayer on windows either), but can't commit a great deal of time
> to it.  It might be better if I commit to maintain windows builds of
> AtomicParsley (not that it's very hard...).  Platforms I *am*
> interested in maintaining are ubuntu and the d-link dns-323 NAS.

If you want to take it over (and are planning to stick with NSIS), I'm 
happy to hand off my scripts to you.  I'm still willing to get the next 
version out, but if you're stepping up it might be best to take over 
sooner rather than later.  FWIW, I think I've automated the Windows 
build process reasonably well.  As for the installer itself, aside from 
a bunch of code cleanup, the main change I've made is to make it more 
adaptable in dealing with downloaded archives for the various 
dependencies, so changing to a different source for ffmpeg, say, that 
uses a different archive layout or packages 32- and 64-bit builds 
together, won't break the installer.  I've also implemented support for 
creating standalone installers (with all dependencies bundled in), 
should that seem like the way to go.  You hinted that were thinking of 
making your own builds of dependencies, so that feature might prove 
helpful if you decided to bundle everything together.  Anyway, I should 
be able to get my code up on Github sometime later this week, so you can 
judge for yourself.