DX10.3.2 Installer weirdness

[David Schwartz 430]

I flushed out everything from a VM and tried installing Rio 10.3.2, but the installer kept acting as if a previous installation was there. So I went in and manually removed a ton of entries from the Registry that contained "Embarcadero". That fixed the problem.

 

I installed from the ISO image because my internet is going over an LTE connection, and I see no need to DL several GBs of files that are already on the disk image.

 

For the install, I let it install EVERYTHING. It got to the end and said separate installers would run for the other things, but nothing ran after that. Delphi started, but there was only Win32 platform installed. 

 

One thing I do change is the installation folder: I change the name from "Studio" back to "RAD_Studio" the way it used to be (plus an underscore). Old habits die hard, I guess.

 

Re-running the installer showed the same options and all of the options were selected. I ran it and it accomplished ... absolutely nothing.

 

So I fired up the ESD installation EXE and it gave me options to install everything else. There was a note that it's accessible from the IDE, so I closed the ESD EXE and tried it from the Delphi IDE. I guess it just runs the ESD program.

 

I went ahead and ran the ESD installer and it pulled down around 700 MB of stuff from the internet and installed it. The Good News is that it actually ran without reinstalling the whole 7GB or so of previously installed code the way I've seen it do previously!

 

Oddly, it never asked about the installation folder or gave me an option to change it. I figured it just used the registry settings.

 

When it was done, I discovered it ignored the registry settings and dumped everything into a newly created "Studio" folder (not "RAD_Studio" where everything else was), and dutifully added a bunch of new stuff to the search path environment variable.

 

If you have the ISO image loaded, I don't understand why the ESD installer can't use it for its files. I mean, if you're not connected to the internet, you're forced to use the ISO installer, but it seems to have problems installing different platform options for several releases now, that can only be fixed by using the ESD installer. For whatever reason, they both copy the .7z files to a hidden folder somewhere to facilitate reinstalls and updates, so what's the problem here?

 

Also, if you have the ISO image available, why does the installer even need to copy the files to disk? You have to pay for the overhead of the copy in addition to the install, which just slows everything down, so why force a needless copy?

 

I really wish someone at Embt would budget a month to have someone streamline the installation process so everything can be run offline from the ISO media via either installer without wasting the time and space needed to either DL files or copy them to local HD; provide a better way to install and uninstall chunks of Delphi without all of this redoing stuff; and make the uninstall process work faster.

 

(I found that if I run a full uninstall, it takes around 40 minutes, but if I delete everything in the Embarcadero/<vers> folder first, it completes the uninstall in 5 minutes, although it may leave crap scattered throughout the Registry -- not totally clear about this, tho.)

[David Schwartz 430]

Another thing I'd love to see is a better way of preserving the state of installed components as well as the toolbar at the top. 

 

I realize these are two unrelated and very different things, but at least a checklist of previously installed components and libs, along with their installed versions and dates, would be really handy. 

 

I run the migration tool and saved the output on several upgrades, then ran it on the new version, and it has never changed the toolbar layout at the top. I've never gotten that to work, although I've had people tell me it works for them.

 

Can't stuff like this be made amenable to support with external DevOps tools? Everything is locked inside of the installer and nobody outside of the factory can do anything to fix or improve it at all.

Edited December 25, 2019 by David Schwartz