New ideas for WPI

[ozbob]

Hasi001,

WPI has improved a lot since the 2.x.x version. It has become much more to my liking. Anyway I would like to use not only as a post install but during deployment of Windows. Currently we use several stages to deploy applications e.g. unattended from command line; pre-installed software in an image and finally post installed software on the deployed image. The installation process runs in three stages and requires 4 reboots.

In order to use WPI in this context I would need another field to specify the installation stage and some way of splitting the installation in several parts going through the sections of the install process.

In such a case a config file in the form of an ini file would make things easier to parse to runoncex.

I have been thinking about extending the use of WPI even further; I currently use

a software plugin directory that contains a config file for each app. WPI could be used to go through the folders collect the config files and compile a list of the selectable software components that can be selected. It could then generate a copy list of the apps to the copied into the $OEM$ directory and generate the install scripts for the applications.

These are just some of my thaughts on the use of WPI. Maybe it might be out of scope for the targets of WPI. I would already be glad if I have some config files to work with; so instead of writing to the registry WPI would produce a file instead. I could then use this file to shape things as required.

So to make long story short:

- I like to have WPI have an option to either write runonce keys in the registry or have it output a file with an 'ini'structure.

- I would like to have a section included that specifies a section (as described above) and can sort things on this basis followed by the current sorting design already in WPI.

Please let me know your idea on the above.

Thanks ozbob

[hasi001]

I think that's a 1 user only change request.

Writing an ini-file wouldn't be that hard. WPI already writes files. You could easily adapt the file-writing methods combined with the registry-write method to suit your needs and create an ini file. I won't do it.

And this 'section that specifies a section'-thing is a bit too complicated for me. WPI isn't coded to work with reboots.

Sorry, man.