Re: Unattended install on Windows

[Michael G. Zinner]

Hi tamast,

To enable an unattended installation was one of the reasons we switched to WiX / MSI. So hopefully we can get it to work for your case.

Add 1) When you start the MSIEXEC without any parameter you get a nice little dialog that explains all the option you can use from the command line. The last one is Optional Parameters. You can use this to set MSI properties. Take this example:

msiexec /i mysql-4.1.5-gamma-essential-win.msi INSTALLDIR=C:\MySQL

This will set the installation directory to C:\MySQL. Verify this by pressing [Next >] one time after you have executed the command above.

But there was a reason why we did not make the default C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server or mysqld. We have the following issue.

There is always only *one* version of the server that is recommended to use in production environments, currently this is 4.0. Then there are developer releases, like 4.1.5 and preview releases like 5.0.1. A normal MySQL developer usually wants two different servers to be installed, the current production release and the latest development release, so he can add support for the new features.

This is the reason why we made each "version" of the server a different "product" in the MSI sence. So it is possible to have this installed on your machine (when using default settings):

C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 4.1
C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0
C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1

And each of these versions has its own upgrade functionality. For example, if you have installed 4.1.5 and you want to upgrade to 4.1.6 this will be handled by the MSI file automatically. What cannot be done is to "migrate" a 4.1 server to a 5.0 server. Although the server will handle the migration process automatically (by upgrading the .frm a.s.o.) it might be better to use a dedicated migration tool to handle the migration process.

If this is no issue for you, I can suggest one other thing. We will make the Bitkeeper repositories containing the WiX files + resource files public soon. Then, you can create your own setup using a single MSI product GUID for all servers. Please tell if you would be interested in doing so. If yes, we would publish our internal documentation how to create the setups.


Add 2) Can you tell me why you use /qb and not /qn or /quiet ? For /qn or /quiet we will not show the "MySQL.com Signup Wizard". But like above, you can easily change that yourself if you build the .msi file yourself.


One other question: Would you be interested to also include the Configuration Wizard in the quiet installation? So that not only the files are copied but also an optimized server configuration file is wirtten and a Window Service for the server is created and started?
Because if you run a quiet installation at the moment you only get the server installed and not configured or installed as a service.

If so we could add a quiet mode to the Configuration Wizard as well and you could use a different paremter from the command line to start it.