Getting started
================

Here are the steps you need to follow to author your own installer
builder:

* Install GHC and Bamse. Assuming here that you've already 
  done that.

* Build Bamse; by default, it uses the 'Base' template,
  resulting in an installer builder, mkInstaller.exe, which
  simply creates empty MSI installers.

* Building Bamse is done by typing 'make' in the toplevel directory,
  provided you've first changed the setting of HC in the Makefile to
  point to your local installation of GHC.

* Create your own template module. Have a look at doc/using.txt for
  information about what module signature you need to
  supply. Consulting/copying examples in templates/ is also a good way
  to get started.

* Hook in your template by adding an import to it in Main.hs. To keep
  things simple (by avoiding editing of the Makefile), just add the
  template module to the templates/ directory.

* re-make Bamse to produce a 'mkInstaller' builder for your project.
  Use --help to discover the set of options supported, but typical
  invocations are:
  
    foo$ mkInstaller --generate-guids -o myInstaller.msi c:/path/to/the/top/of/my/dist/tree
    foo$ mkInstaller -u -o myInstaller.msi c:/path/to/the/top/of/my/dist/tree

  The latter one re-uses the GUIDs of the existing 'myInstaller.msi'
  to create a new one. You want to do that to when creating updates/bugfixes
  of existing products without upgrading its version numbers; please notice
  that it overwrites the .msi in the end, so please make a copy if the
  MSI is precious..

* Ship the resulting installer and/or give us feedback on what did or
  didn't work for you.