I’ve been planning to do a new Windows installer for a while and finally had the time to actually do it.
The old installer has seen better times, not compatible with Windows 10, unmaintained and slow to generate. So we are due for an upgrade.
My plan was to replace qtifw with Inno, a stable and maintained installer for Windows. I also wanted to save some space and only distribute one file for Windows, a zip with the installer included.
Just unzip the file and open the folder, there you will notice a new file: Setup.exe.
Run Setup.exe to install Natron.
Note that the installation folder is Program Files\Natron instead of Program Files\INRIA\Natron-VERSION that was used in the old installer. The installer supports upgrades so I see no reason to use a folder for each version.
You can of course just run Natron from the bin folder as before, no installation required.
Feedback welcome, I would like to have this ready for our next release if possible.
Would recommend keeping the option to install to a versioned folder rather than only giving the ability to upgrade the existing install. Some users / studios have multiple versions installed based on the project and such. Good to future proof and whatnot. I don’t personally do this (because I’m one person) but have worked in places that do.
Additional possible problem, now that there is an option to not install the documentation (pretty sure that wasn’t present before?) the program won’t redirect to the live docs and instead the user gets a page not found error (because of course the files aren’t there).
As usual avast complained I installed a suspicious file but finally agreed on the installation .
Then the installer asked for administrator rights. With an odd behavior of restarting automatically the process 3 times then finally opening the prompt with the black screen to let me agree on installing the software.
then the process seemed to crash without information to the user but restarted automatically then finally succeeded. (pretty odd isn’t it?)
Also my first test with only Natron option checked resulted with an install with community GLSL plugins visible (from my previous installs probably ) in the menus but crashing natron with error:
“While executing script:
Crok_cellular…
Python error:
Python exception: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute
‘setScriptName’…”
Maybe we could warn new users to keep “full installation” as the safer way to go.
All in all, seems good to me. Maybe we should advice new users to launch installer with “Run as administrator”.
I should also add that my knowledge is not sufficient to let me understand the benefits from the new installer . And most of all many many thanks to Ole-André and Frédéric
Here is a shorter (and probably better) reply:
Works very well when avast antivirus is completely disabled… even with the files for Natron 2.3.16B4 archive.
Just download latest snapshot from SourceForge, it has the installer included.
Can’t do anything about that
The installer will ask for administrator rights when you do a “global” install. Windows should give you a prompt yes/no then go back to the installer. It does this on my Windows machines (v8, v10 latest and 19.09).
Not able to replicate.
Full is default, not installing some OFX plugins will break third-party PyPlugs that depend on them of course. The old installer also has this option.
.
. And most of all many many thanks to Ole-André and Frédéric