Work on Windows installer

[Pavel Sanda]

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 07:30:51AM +0200, Yu Jin wrote:
> 1. I could rewrite everything that I think is doable in a much better way,
> this would mean actually creating a new installer, then checking the old
> one function by function and then deciding which to rewarite and which to
> adopt. This would have a potential of new bugs and I would probably share
> it once it is all finished.
> 
> 2. Make multiple smaller changes to the current installer always sharing
> and continuing after they have been accepted. This would take a hell lot of
> time and require to make sure that the installer still works after each
> change. The result would probably be not as good as in 1.
> 
> 3. leaving it as it is and forgetting about it.
> 
> First option is most appealing to me, well, I probably dont have to tell
> you why (fun and challenge). If I were to do any work on the installer,
> then of course I would make sure, that it remains all of it's functionality
> (e.g. silentinstall) and if I run into problems, I would ask for advice and
> talk about progress as this would take some time.
> 
> That said, besides some NSIS experiments I have not done anything on this
> yet and wanted to talk first to avoid the situation of silently doing
> something big in my corner without anybody else knowing about it.
> 
> Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for sharing all these thoughts.

If you can see better way how to organize the code and improve readability
that's generally good direction.

If you decide for solution 1:

- the most important point is your willingness to stay around for a while
  during 2.4.x series and actively fixing installer bugs which inevitably
  appear after rewrite. This might be sometimes tricky as users are installing
  lyx on very different setups/windows versions etc.  (i.e. the time for coding
  per se is only half work you will spend on it at the end...)

- You might want fork the current installer into completely new directory so we
  have choice to easily switch back if things go wrong.

- Any major rewrite better be finished before we start releasing 2.4 betas so
  it gets proper testing. JMarc did not share any release plans yet, but my
  sense is we are talking about couple months(?).

Pavel