Registry handling on windows (installer)

[Jean-Marc Lasgouttes]

Le 06/03/2020 à 09:08, Yu Jin a écrit :
> Hi all,
> I've been training nsis and experimenting with the windows installer. I 
> think I am somewhat confident with that topic now. The purpose of this 
> Email is that I see some issues in the registry handling in the code for 
> the installer and I would like to discuss those issues.

Hi Yu Jin,

Here are some of my answer of non windows developer.

> 1. We create e.g. "Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\LyX2344", this 
> is not convenient when searching the computer if any LyX is installed 
> (using code). I would rather do it like imagemagick does, so 
> "Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\LyX\2344". This would be a 
> somewhat huge change. This is also my issue with TeXLive, because it 
> also adds version number to its name, so I will have to do something 
> about that aswell (see nsis function LaTeXActions in LaTeX.nsh)

Makes sense to me.

> 2. Imagemagick: The installer does not check if there is already 
> imagemagick in the registry, it just puts it in there and creates a 
> value "Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ImageMagick\OnlyWithLyx". 
[...]

> 3. In order to not have to reinstall LyX when the user desides to remove 
> his imagemagick and/or ghostscript (or an earlier version of LyX), we 
> would need to make LyX being able to repair the registry for these 2 
> programs. 
[...]

What I would propose for this kind of problem is to bundle a portable 
version of imagemagick with LyX. I would expect that this does not 
require registry hacking.

It is nice that you spend time on these issues, BTW.

JMarc