Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Using Delphi in a team

I was just reading

2 comments:

  1. Chris -

    I agree that it would be a non-trivial undertaking to implement a solution. Your example of DevExpress is one where the vendor has actually setup a decent install tool. The majority of vendors have no install tool or, at best, a very poor one. A standardized solution could permit even the small vendors to have a decent installation package and, perhaps, a decent license management system.

    Your suggestion that you don't install updates that frequently doesn't match to my experience. I find that I receive updates from third party vendors or CG either monthly or every other month. I'd like to keep current with their fixes but it's a major hassle to do so.

    At any rate, my suggestion for a unified installer was more wishful thinking than any expectation that it would be accomplished. I still believe it is a product niche that should be addressed if only in terms of productivity. Your wiki method (we use Word, but it works the same way) entails a lot of work for both the writer and the implementer. I think a developer's time is better spent doing their job, not installing tools to do their job.

    m

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  2. Marshall,

    We don't update the components that often because it causes all sorts of problems with our QA team. Unless there's a critical fix that we need, we update the components at the start of our release cycle (we do two a year).

    If you are updating a lot, then have you considered writing your own component updater? You would install to one local machine and then copy the bits to a shared folder. You would then run an app that copied the files to the local folder and register the packages. You would need to write some soft of manifest that listed the packages to install, but that can be automated by doing before and after snapshots of the package registry entries.

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