user-friendly installer for Windows -- for my Dad!

[zooko]

My dad would love to see some new grand-children movies. I would love for there to be a package for Tahoe on Windows that was simple enough to install that he could install it on his home computer.

The starting point should probably be to find out how well setuptools and py2exe have grown together since last we looked...

​http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools ​http://www.py2exe.org/index.cgi/ExeWithEggs ​http://www.py2exe.org/index.cgi/News

[zooko]

See also ticket #182 -- user-friendly installer for Mac -- for my Mom!

[zooko]

We're focussing on an imminent v0.7.0 (see ​the roadmap) which hopefully has #197 -- Small Distributed Mutable Files and also a fix for #199 -- bad SHA-256. So I'm bumping less urgent tickets to v0.7.1.

[zooko]

We need to choose a manageable subset of desired improvements for [ ​http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/milestone/0.7.1 v0.7.1], scheduled for two week hence, so I'm bumping this one into ​v0.7.2, scheduled for mid-December.

[zooko]

See tickets #242 -- "binary package for win32" and #243 -- "package including all dependencies for win32" which are two steps leading up to this ticket.

[zooko]

Brian wrote:

"* add windows-specific code to the installer to automatically create a node, and run it as a service. The install process should have a checkbox (defaulting to Yes) to do the service thing. The install should also create a "tahoe" executable (for command-line tools like 'tahoe ls'), and a "tahoe-client" executable (which just runs the client). The goal for this is to allow a user to run multiple nodes in separate directories, or to just get the default node and have it automatically start. We also need configuration control panels to set an Introducer."

[zooko]

Rob has made some good progress on this already!

[zooko]

I think Rob has pretty much done this, as well as:

• #243 (package including all dependencies for win32)
• #242 (binary package for win32)

but perhaps not yet

• #194 (README.w32)

Rob: please close these tickets as appropriate.

[robk]

the 'make windows-installer' build target takes a py2exe build (c.f. #242) and makes a double-clickable installer for windows. it depends upon innosetup 5 to build the installer.

this includes all the binaries mentioned in #242, and runs the confwiz by default upon install. thus the user, upon install, is prompted to log into or create and account, and the machine's tahoesvc node is thus configured.

this installer also includes the 'winfuse' subsystem and the 'allmydatatray.exe' which provide, respectively, an SMB interface to the tahoe filesystem, allowing browsing and use of the fs via windows explorer and arbitrary apps, and a small system-tray ui widget making it easy to start/stop the tahoe service, access that SMB share ('drive') and to launch the built in windows backup facilities.

[zooko]

This Windows package has long since bit-rotted due to being unmaintained and not having tests.