MLton/MinGW installer on Experimental

[Wesley W. Terpstra]

I've added some scripts to package/mlton that build an MSI installer for MLton. You'll find this installer on <http://mlton.org/Experimental>. It's 40MB and bundles MinGW with it. Not much to say really, except that it works and is rather cool to see in action. =) Should hopefully make installing MLton on windows completely painless.

That installer doesn't make any start menu entries or desktop icons, though this is easy. I just didn't know what we would want put there, so did nothing for now. Probably some sort of links to documentation or the website should go in the start menu. I'm not sure what a 'MLton' icon should do, except maybe just starting up msys.bat. Speaking of which, I need a MLton icon. ;-)

Enjoy.

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[Ville Laurikari]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 05:48:46AM +0200, Wesley W. Terpstra wrote:
> I've added some scripts to package/mlton that build an MSI installer for
> MLton. You'll find this installer on <http://mlton.org/Experimental>. It's
> 40MB and bundles MinGW with it. Not much to say really, except that it works

Wow, this is really excellent.  It goes a long way into making MLton
more accessible to Windows users.

I installed it and it works fine.  I'd like to make a couple of
suggestions to make it even better.

It would be good to include a .bat or program to run MLton from
outside the msys environment.  It would set up the path and whatnot,
and then run the mlton (script) with bash.  This way people who don't
want to get into the shell could just run MLton from a makefile or
IDE, without caring about MinGW and bash.

The installer could give an option to add this mlton.bat or program in
the system PATH, so it could be run directly from anywhere without
extra hassle.

The machine I installed this on didn't have a MinGW/msys previously.
I assume it won't interfere with a separately installed MinGW and msys?

> That installer doesn't make any start menu entries or desktop icons, though
> this is easy. I just didn't know what we would want put there, so did
> nothing for now. Probably some sort of links to documentation or the website
> should go in the start menu.

Typical start menu items are some subset of these:
  * Link to start the program
  * A "README" or "About" document link
  * Website link
  * Links to included documents
  * Uninstall link

> I'm not sure what a 'MLton' icon should do,
> except maybe just starting up msys.bat. Speaking of which, I need a MLton
> icon. ;-)

Because MLton isn't really useful as a program that you just run, I
think a desktop icon is not needed at all.  Perhaps a start menu link
to start the bundled msys shell would be a good idea, though.

--
http://www.iki.fi/vl/

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[Wesley W. Terpstra]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:55 AM, Ville Laurikari <ville@...> wrote:

It would be good to include a .bat or program to run MLton from
outside the msys environment.  It would set up the path and whatnot,
and then run the mlton (script) with bash.  This way people who don't
want to get into the shell could just run MLton from a makefile or
IDE, without caring about MinGW and bash.

The installer could give an option to add this mlton.bat or program in
the system PATH, so it could be run directly from anywhere without
extra hassle.

I've done both. The new installer (r6811) has a mlton.bat stuck in the path (along with gcc, ld, make, etc).

Typical start menu items are some subset of these:
 * Link to start the program
 * A "README" or "About" document link
 * Website link
 * Links to included documents
 * Uninstall link

I did all of these except the Uninstall link, since I read somewhere that this is forbidden by the "windows logo", whatever that means. At any rate, apparently it's not something nice programs do.

Because MLton isn't really useful as a program that you just run, I
think a desktop icon is not needed at all.  Perhaps a start menu link
to start the bundled msys shell would be a good idea, though.

The MSYS shell has a link from the Start Menu.

I also associated MLton to the extensions .sml and .mlb. They show up with a ... very artistic ... logo and double-clicking on them will automatically launch MLton to compile them.

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