Thanks, Tarek. I think I see why he commented it out -- there's the issue of having your hands on the .ico bits when you need them. Though it does seem that the MSI installer requires it in spite of the docs. But the real problem turns out to be in the add_scripts() method. Right now, it starts out def add_scripts(self): if self.install_script: add_data(self.db, "CustomAction", [("install_script", 50, "PYTHON", self.install_script_key)]) add_data(self.db, "InstallExecuteSequence", [("install_script", "NOT Installed", 6800)]) But if the target dir has a space in the path, this command invocation will fail, because Python will only see the first part of the path name. If I add double-quotes around the install script name, it works: def add_scripts(self): if self.install_script: # need to quote install_script_key here to pass pathnames containing # spaces (like "Program Files") through add_data(self.db, "CustomAction", [("install_script", 50, "PYTHON", '"' + self.install_script_key + '"')]) add_data(self.db, "InstallExecuteSequence", [("install_script", "NOT Installed", 6800)]) And, my other question, was, how should the script exit? Seems that sys.exit(0) works just fine. Bill Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:45 PM, Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.com> wrote:

...

When I try to include a post-install script in my MSI built with bdist_msi, it seem to be included and unpacked properly, but it doesn't run successfully.  Here's what's in the script (after unpacking):

#!c:\Python26\python.exe

# do nothing much import sys, os, time print "Hello, World"

time.sleep(10) sys.exit(0)

And here's what I get in my install log (generated with "msiexec /i foo.msi /L*v foo.log"):

Action 18:35:46: install_script. Action start 18:35:46: install_script. MSI (s) (40:E0) [18:35:46:882]: Note: 1: 1722 2: install_script 3: C:\Python26\\python.exe 4: C:\Python26\Scripts\foo-install-script.py MSI (s) (40:E0) [18:35:46:882]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (c) (FC:78) [18:35:46:902]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 DEBUG: Error 2835:  The control ErrorIcon was not found on dialog ErrorDlg The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2835. The arguments are: ErrorIcon, ErrorDlg, Error 1722. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor.  Action install_script, location: C:\Python26\\python.exe, command: C:\Python26\Scripts\foo-install-script.py MSI (s) (40:E0) [18:35:50:978]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038

Any ideas?  What's a postinstall script supposed to return or exit with to indicate success or failure, anyway?

What does "The control ErrorIcon was not found on dialog ErrorDlg" mean?

The only reference to ErrorIcon was commented out by Martin a while ago. It was the icon attached to the Error Dialog you. I am not sure why you get this error.

MacZiade:command tarek$ svn blame bdist_msi.py |grep ErrorIcon 42847 martin.v.loewis #error.control("ErrorIcon", "Icon", 15, 9, 24, 24, 5242881, None, "py.ico", None, None)

I am cc'ing him.

...

Bill _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig

-- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org

Martin v. Löwis <martin@v.loewis.de> wrote:

...

The only reference to ErrorIcon was commented out by Martin a while ago. It was the icon attached to the Error Dialog you.

I'm not quite sure why I commented this out. See whether adding it back fixes the problem.

Yes, it gets rid of the secondary error, the bit about ErrorIcon and ErrorDlg.

The only reason I can see now is that py.ico isn't really an appropriate error icon, instead, a stop sign or something like that should be used - I may not have known then (as I don't know now) how to get that into the MSI file.

Well, in http://svn.python.org/projects/sandbox/branches/MvL/msi/msi.py: # Bitmaps add_data(db, "Binary", [("PythonWin", msilib.Binary(srcdir+r"\PCbuild\installer.bmp")), ("Up",msilib.Binary("Up.bin")), ("New",msilib.Binary("New.bin")), ("InfoIcon",msilib.Binary("info.bin")), ("ExclamationIcon",msilib.Binary("exclamic.bin")), ]) Doesn't this work? Bill

...

...

What's a postinstall script supposed to return or exit with to indicate success or failure, anyway? It should return 0 as the exit code.

Thanks. What if there's actually an error? Just throw an exception?

Installer will look for a non-zero exit. It will display it as "a action has failed". So how you arrive at the non-zero exit code is irrelevant.

I was wondering about that. There's this clause in add_find_python:

add_data(self.db, "CustomAction", [("PythonFromMachine", 51+256, "PYTHONDIR", "[PYTHON.MACHINE]"), ("PythonFromUser", 51+256, "PYTHONDIR", "[PYTHON.USER]"), ("PythonExe", 51+256, "PYTHON", "[PYTHONDIR]\\python.exe"), ("InitialTargetDir", 51+256, "TARGETDIR", "[PYTHONDIR]")])

and the backslash there seems redundant. Changing it to "[PYTHONDIR]python.exe" removes the extra backslash in the value of PYTHON. Shall I file a patch?

Sure. Please indicate whether this is just cosmetical (and if so, better file a patch for trunk, which has that code changed). Regards, Martin

But this doesn't look quite complete. I don't see where the Python interpreter is actually invoked here. (Cute trick swapping the args, by the way).

Which is presumably why, in finalize_options, we find:

if self.pre_install_script: raise DistutilsOptionError, "the pre-install-script feature is not yet implemented"

Shouldn't the custom action be this:

add_data(self.db, "CustomAction", [("PreInstall", 2, "PreInstall", '"PYTHON"'), ])

I don't remember the details, but one problem might have been that custom action 2 is defined as "EXE file stored in a Binary table stream." Not sure whether batch files are even allowed here. In any case, the value should probably be '"[PYTHON]"', then so that the property gets expanded. Regards, Martin

So, in add_ui(), I tried changing error.control("ErrorIcon", "Icon", 15, 9, 24, 24, 5242881, None, "py.ico", None, None) to error.control("ErrorIcon", "Icon", 15, 9, 24, 24, 5242881, None, None, None, None) But I still get this (when I've enabled the pre-install script feature), so I think this is a bug in MSI. Now to figure out the pre-install problem, once I've put an icon back in the Dialog. Action 10:32:02: PreInstall. Action start 10:32:02: PreInstall. MSI (s) (2C:A8) [10:32:02:322]: Note: 1: 1721 2: PreInstall 3: C:\WINDOWS\Installer\MSIB4.tmp 4: MSI (s) (2C:A8) [10:32:02:322]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (c) (C8:68) [10:32:02:332]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 DEBUG: Error 2835: The control ErrorIcon was not found on dialog ErrorDlg The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2835. The arguments are: ErrorIcon, ErrorDlg, Error 1721. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action: PreInstall, location: C:\WINDOWS\Installer\MSIB4.tmp, command: MSI (s) (2C:A8) [10:32:05:286]: Note: 1: 2262 2: Error 3: -2147287038 MSI (s) (2C:A8) [10:32:05:286]: Product: UpLib-1.7.9 -- Error 1721. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action: PreInstall, location: C:\WINDOWS\Installer\MSIB4.tmp, command:

Looks like we need JScript (what can that do, though?) or VBScript.

Not sure whether users could accept writing JScript or VBScript for bdist_msi, so (atleast for bdist_msi), I would like to either support Python pre-install scripts, or not support pre-install scripts at all. The question is whether we could trick a VBScript into also being a Python script. As this might be an interesting puzzle to solve, I'd like to pose it to the entire distutils-sig readership. So here is the problem again: As a batch file, my attempt at having a batch file that is also a Python script was to write it as rem=""" %1 %0 exit """ <python code here> This should have been run with argv[1] being the path to the Python interpreter. As a batch file, the first line is a comment, the second line runs Python, anbd the third line terminates the script (so it doesn't consider the following lines). As a Python script, the first block is a variable assignment, followed by the regular Python script. Now (as Installer won't run batch files) we need the same as VBScript (or, failing that, as JScript). The script would be computed at the time of MSI generation. TIA, Martin