Bamse: creating Windows MSI installers

The result is available for you to hopefully also make good use of in your software projects. It offers the following features:

• Programmatic specification of installer builders.

  By providing a Haskell module that tailors a general MSI installation framework to the needs of your project, a command-line based installer builder is produced. When invoked, it bundles together the files and metadata that make up your installer, outputting an MSI ready for distribution.

• Authoring shell integration

  On top of handling the installation of files and directories, the tool lets you specify how to integrate its contents into the Windows environment. For instance, the start menu items to add, desktop shortcuts, and the creation of new file types.

• Registry handling

  Should your application depend on the Registry for operation, installation of Registry keys and values can easily be added.

• Configurable UI

  The installation UI can easily be modified to include your own logos and artwork.

• High-level support for building installers for GHC library packages

  To give Haskell developers a leg-up, special support is provided for authoring installer builders for GHC library packages. Apart from bundling up the files that make up your package, it also supports the automatic registration of a package with the user's local installation of GHC.

Downloading and installing

Installation should install and register these GHC-6.2.1 packages along with Bamse, but if they're not registered, here's how to do it manually:

foo$ cd "c:/Program Files/ComPkg"
foo$ hd_imp="c:/Program Files/ComPkg/imports" \
      hd_lib="c:/Program Files/ComPkg" \
      hd_inc="c:/Program Files/include" \
      c:/ghc/ghc-6.2.1/bin/ghc-pkg -u com i com.pkg
foo$ cd "c:/Program Files/GaloisPkg"
foo$ TARGETDIR="c:/Program Files/GaloisPkg" \
     c:/ghc/ghc-6.2.1/bin/ghc-pkg -u galois i galois.pkg