Re: Windows binaries and installer fixes for 30.0.93

[Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st>]

Hi Francis, more detail in-line below, but: thanks so much for your
work testing.

Based on what you've said I suspect the installer is where we want it
to be for Emacs 30.1 now.

Please review my additional responses/comments and let me know if you
agree (or, if not, what else you might be critical to fix before the
release is cut).

On Mon, Dec 23, 2024 at 4:29 AM Francis Wright <f.j.wright@live.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the update. The _4 version of the installer seems to behave as I would expect on Windows. It creates a Start menu link called Emacs that runs Emacs. I presume that the next version of Emacs will overwrite that link so that by default users will just have that one link that runs the latest version of Emacs, although older versions will still be installed, but not accessible via the Start menu. I was able to uninstall Emacs 30.0.93 via the Apps Settings page. Everything that was supposed to disappear did so, and nothing else disappeared. So this all looks good to me.
>

The installer creates one Start Menu folder per run (given that
creating Start Menu shortcuts was not when the installer was run).
Each shortcut is named for the release version (e.g. "emacs-30.0.93"
in the case of all of these versions of the pretest installer).  This
isn't new behavior but is the way the installer has worked for years
(long before I was using it myself to build the binary releases).

We have talked about adding more choices/controls to the installer
page, for example we could offer a page with choices like this:
  How would you like to install?
    (x) separate folders and Start Menu shortcuts for each install Emacs
    ( ) Rolling updates to one copy of Emacs on my system

I have been of view that it will be best to take on this type of new
functionality in the master (not release) branch, meaning after we get
the installer stable and free from obvious bugs with what it already
is supposed to be able to do (hopefully in time for Emacs 30.1).

> However, the installer still displays the Choose Start Menu Folder dialogue, even though it no longer uses a Start menu folder, so it might be better to suppress that dialogue. Alternatively, you could keep the folder and put the link to the executable in it, so that users would see all the installed versions of Emacs in the Start menu. That would be consistent with the recent behaviour of the installer and might be a better option.
>

The Start Menu related options are not ignored (although checking the
box to suppress creating shortcuts should work now).  I added the
Uninstaller regkey so that we can launch uninstaller via the Control
Panel but that didn't (shouldn't have, doesn't seem to ) cause
anything about launching Emacs (or the uninstaller) via the start menu
shortcuts (when they are enabled to be created during installation).

Overall your (I perceive) expectation that the Windows Installer
should effectively default to "in-place" upgrades of a single version
of Emacs makes sense to me, but: that isn't what it has ever done in
the past (at least, not by design) and it would be a big enough change
I'd much rather do it on master where we'll have a good long time
after installing to hear back from people who might find the new
behavior surprising, new options confusing, etc.

I'm wide open to ideas/suggestions on how to spiff-up the installer
but I think, for this round of patching, we should focus on making it
do what it "has always done" without major defects.  After that we can
turn our attention to improvements, knowing that the 30.1 installer
won't be as terrible as the 29.x series installers were.

TDYT?

With Gratitude and Curiosity,
Corwin