Re: [Gretl-devel] Installation on Windows

Thoughts based on some quick research. When the gretl installer is being run on Windows there are three main cases to consider: 1. gretl is being installed by someone who has admin (or at least "power user") rights, and this person will also be using gretl. I believe that's the most likely case, at least in the American academic sphere, and in this case what we do currently is fine.

2. gretl is being installed by an admin user, on behalf of someone else who doesn't have admin rights but who will actually use the progam. In this case the install should go OK, though as Sven points out it will redundantly create a gretl userdir tree for the admin user. When the ordinary user runs the program there may be some permissions issues on saving settings. This should be fixable without too much difficulty.

3. An unprivileged user is trying to install gretl on their own account. This will fail at present. It's possible we could set things up so that it'll work: don't install gretl into PROGRAMFILES but into a per-user directory; don't attempt to write registry keys under "Local Machine", only "Current User". MSDN says: "During setup your application should check to see whether the application is being installed by a user account having the privileges to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. If your setup is not run by a user with write permissions to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, the application should notify the user with a message such as, "You are not allowed to install this application for all users on this machine; do you want to install this application for personal use?" All users should be able to install an application for their own use." Conversely, if the user does have admin status we could ask: "You are installing gretl as an administrator; will you be using the program yourself?" -- and create a userdir tree only if the answer to that is Yes. I'm not sure yet how much of this can be done with the current version of Inno Setup, but I'm trying to figure that out.