Setups within setup

[Lavrendi]

I want to package a number of existing setup packages...

My first try was designate each setup.exe as a "package" in a "mega-setup" and execute them in queue. But there are two downside to this approach:

1) all selected setup are copied in %tempdir% in one shot at installation time, wasting hard disk.
2) even if "wait for program to finish" is selected, a SF setup.exe relay the installation to another installation component. As a result, the next setup.exe is launched before the previous setup.exe has actually ended.

The correct procedure for a mega-setup would be:

Welcome to Mega-Setup
Select packages (actually a number of setup.exe)
Copy package1 setup.exe to %TempDir%
Execute package1 setup.exe
Finish package1 setup.exe
Delete Package1 setup.exe in %TempDir%
Copy package2 setup.exe to %TempDir%
Execute package2 setup.exe
Finish package2 setup.exe
Delete Package2 setup.exe in %TempDir%
...
etc
...
Finish Mega-setup

Is it doable ?

[Brett]

Run each SUF60 setup with the /W command line option. That will force the calling setup to wait until it finishes.

[Lavrendi]

Great ! One thing solved !

What about the fact that all sub-packages are copied at once in the %tempdir% ?

Suppose I have ten setup, each 10meg of size. The mega-setup copy 10 x 10 meg on hard disk at install time, then excute and delete each package one by one. Hard disk requirement is at least 100 meg.

I can't figure out how to copy only 1 setup at a time, execute and delete it before launching the other one. (having a hard disk requirement of only 10 meg).

[Darryl]

From my perspective, I don't see any way around this. If you need all contents to be archived inside of the main installation executable, they will need to be extracted at some point. There are currently only two ways to extract contents from an installation's archive:

1) Using the Primer Files feature that initially extracts files from the archive when it is launched (Found in General Design).

2) Installing those files on the user's system using the normal method.

Currently you cannot extract contents on a per file basis anywhere during the install.

So the best case scenario is to split them in half, by extracting a few as primer files and the rest being installed normally.

Hope that helps.

[Lavrendi]

Thanks for answering.

Meanwhile, I found another, easy solution...

As a matter of fact, there is no need at all to include sub-setup.exe in the mega-setup ! Why should we ? The sub-setup are already packaged and will extract to the %TempDir%.

The easy solution is therefore simply to launch the sub-setup directly from the %SrcDir% where the mega-setup is.

Megasetup.exe
setup1.exe
setup2.exe
...
setupn.exe

Then, just execute each %SrcDir%\setupn.exe. Each one will in turn copy and delete files to the %TempDir% before launching another setup.exe.

I should have thought of it before !