While answering Wigsy's post I found out that the articles about standalone installers have recently been updated. Gone is the "preinstall" using the Sophos Anti-Virus.msi.
Before I comment on details I want to point out that the Best Practice: setting up home users article is not really up to date: It's wrong for "post-XP" as well as 64bit systems (even though it has been updated March 2010) and it does suggest a procedure different from the one in the more recent how to create a standalone installer package using Enterprise Console v4 or v4.5 and how to create a standalone installer package using Enterprise Console v3. Thus I think the "Best practices" needs to be updated accordingly.
The new procedure uses a two-step approach (probably to get around some issues with applying the .xml policies). It uses two (partial) copies of the CID: One containing the initial installer, SAU and CRT for the first step and the other - the "first update location" - all desired components (minus CRT and the initial installer). I have not yet tested it but it should work.
The suggested approach (creating an SFX archive and running setup.exe after extraction) won't work though when the self extractor deletes the temporary files when the command has finished (as is often the case and also desired). Thus AutoUpdate won't find the folder configured with -updp. V.v. if you keep the extracted files (if the extractor doesn't permit it you can use a "wrapper" script to copy the temporary files and modify the -updp accordingly) you will not be able to remove them automatically as you can't reliably determine when AutoUpdate no longer needs them.
Comments?
Christian
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