Spanning

[Lord_Nord]

NSIS is a really great tool but i'm missing one important feature.

I would like to span the installation to either costum sizes or predefined values such as diskette size (1,44 MB)

is their a posiblity to do this in the current version?

[saivert]

Why bother with spanning. Floppy disks are out anyway, sure they will be used for minor copies/distribution to older computer without LS-FLOPPY drives and ZIP drives, but it isn't the big thing anymore, OK!
As I feel commit to provide help: Zip the entire NSIS installer executable with WinZip and then make a Spanned Self Extractor using WinZip Self-Extractor 2.2 BETA (Important: not the 2.2 non-BETA, it hasn't spanning) and make it run your installer when all disks are unzipped. Finito!

[saivert]

Why bother with spanning. Floppy disks are out anyway, sure they will be used for minor copies/distribution to older computer without LS-FLOPPY drives and ZIP drives, but it isn't the big thing anymore, OK!
As I feel commit to provide help: Zip the entire NSIS installer executable with WinZip and then make a Spanned Self Extractor using WinZip Self-Extractor 2.2 BETA (Important: not the 2.2 non-BETA, it hasn't spanning) and make it run your installer when all disks are unzipped. Finito! Visit http://www.winzip.com to download it.

Edit: PS! Winzip.com may not have the BETA so try out their FTP instead: ftp://ftp.winzip.com

[petersa]

I honestly can't remember the last time I used a floppy! :)

[webspider84]

NSIS was developed for Winzip, an Internet distubuted program, both nullsoft and this community have not seen any need to use impliment this function. But yes Winzip 8 will do all this for you if ... you pay em £10 for registration!!

[mcgarrah]

Why would you ever build something bigger than
1.4MB? Anything you should want to do should be
done in less than 1MB. :)

[Lord_Nord]

Why should i use any external programms such as winzip let the user extract the data, install the stuff and then manually delete the files especially if you don't need all files because you only selected 1 menuitem?

Anyway yesterday i made a script that built a 1500 mb installation. how to distribute it? Neither zip nor cd-writer can be used due to the noexistence of spanning.
And archives larger than 5 mb are not as exotic as you may think.

[rainwater]

I don't think NSIS is designed to install 1.5 gigs. 99.999% of the users are not going to be creating archives that big. Since, it seems like you are creating the installer for yourself, why not just winzip or rar or span them. I don't think most installers create spanned archives anymore anyways.

[c2R]

Thats as maybe, but since the floppy disk is standard on everyone's PC disk spanning would be a nice feature to have.

Fortionately at the moment none of my programs are over 700k...

[petersa]

If you don't mind rewriting the script, you could use Inno Setup (http://www.innosetup.com/). It supports spanning for any size. Suitable for floppies, Zips and CDs.

Sure, the installation will be 100k bigger, but hey, you need to span anyway so there!

Damn, I'm good! :)