"Windows Installer" gone in KMD17?

Greetings All,

I’ve just started using KMD17 and found that the “Windows Installer” section of the KPS editor is no more. Is there a new approach to follow for creating installers?

Apologies if I’m overlooking available information on the topic. A note on the change would be helpful to add to the " What’s new in Keyman Developer 17.0" web page.

thanks!

Hello @dyacob,

Thank you for raising this up. I created a feature request after finding no resource to help with this, and hopefully we could get some answers whether the feature is deprecated and is there another solution to get the .exe file.

As of now, we should be able to use the .kmp file with Keyman and I will continue giving you updates when possible.

A lot of the team is away for a few weeks, so it might take some time to get a definitive answer.

I think the Windows package installer got replaced with the new kmc compiler. Details at

Note: the current standalone files are at
https://downloads.keyman.com/windows/stable/17.0.326/

Apologies if I’m overlooking available information on the topic. A note on the change would be helpful to add to the " What’s new in Keyman Developer 17.0" web page.

We can update the issue @mengheng created to improve our documentation

1 Like

Thank You @mengheng & @darcy , I’ll look into learning to use kmc .

I think it is still useful to have the exe compiler integrated into the KMD interface, I used the feature quite a bit.

1 Like

If you look in the Source tab you’ll still see the <MSIFileName/>. I suspect you can edit the source and add in the msi that way even if it’s not available through the UI.

1 Like

We moved away from using <MSIFileName/> data in the package. This is because it is putting data specific to a given computer into a shared data file. Instead, use:

kmc build windows-package-installer --msi <path-to-keyman-desktop.msi> --exe <path-to-setup.exe> --license <path-to-keyman-license.txt>

feat(developer): remove Delphi package installer compiler 🎺 by mcdurdin · Pull Request #9616 · keymanapp/keyman · GitHub was where we removed the UX from Keyman Developer. I intended to write up a KB article on how to use kmc instead but lost track of that, sorry.

Reference documentation: kmc command line reference

Now, added a note to the What’s New Page: docs: Add windows-package-installer notes to whats-new.md by mcdurdin · Pull Request #1303 · keymanapp/help.keyman.com · GitHub

1 Like

Though resolved, I do have a follow-up question now that I’ve tried working with kmc. With the --title-image option, what image dimensions should be used?

I tried applying the left sidebar image used with KMP packages, but it wasn’t a good fit. A recommendation/request would be to have another flag (like --use-kps-image=true) to have the installer interface display the package image specified in the KPS file (in the usual way) in addition to the Keyman app banner (not replacing it).

This added visual I think would offer reassurance to the user that they are installing the keyboard that they think the are installing -just as it benefits the KMP installer interface.

thanks!

-Daniel

@dyacob, could you open a feature request on that idea? The bundled Windows Installer for packages doesn’t receive all that much attention these days, as we don’t actually use it on the Keyman site any more (using instead a ‘clever hack’ of embedding the name of the package to be downloaded in the filename of the installer :slight_smile: ).

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed after 7 days. New replies are no longer allowed.