[Package Builder] Building installer from LabVIEW 2020 SP1 package fails

[Scott_Richardson]

Steps for option 3 does not require any use of the Input panes or the Editor pane. Those panes are for creating new packages. Hopefully this helps clarify:

1. Download offline installer for product of interest, i.e. LabVIEW 2020 and place on disk.
2. Launch NIPB and start with new solution.
3. In the Installers and Repositories pane, select New Package Installer button above the pane.
4. Select the new New Package Installer item in the pane.
5. Click the Add Packages button above the pane, which displays the Add Packages to 'New Package Installer' dialog.
6. Select the Installer Products tab in the dialog
7. Select Add Installer button in the dialog and then navigate to and select the "Install.exe" file for the offline installer on disk. Once complete, the dialog will now list the top-level packages from the installer in the dialog.
8. Select the packages you want to include and click the Add button in the dialog. Now the packages are included in "New Package Install" in the Installers and Repositories pane.
9. Click the build Build All button in the Installers and Repositories pane.

For each package you include in the installer, you can specify its "Installation behavior" property to be to always install or optionally install (allows end-user to select whether to install).

[Mahatma_Andy]

Sorry for late response, didn't get into this for a while.

So I succeeded in building an installer as described by you. But now I can't figure out how to silently install this.

[Oli_Wachno]

Check out 20.7 release notes 😉

[Mahatma_Andy]

I digged into it but:

When I use the --quiet or --passive flag the installer quits without any message. If I start it with GUI I have to accept upgrades of certain packages, check the recommended packages and have to accept to uninstall some packages. I think that's the reason for the termination of the Installer. But I can't pass any flags that will do this automatically (or didn't find 'em).

[CL_eisenwr]

Yeah, the Package Installers currently do not have the ability to pass all the same options as the NIPKG.exe does. Also it does not print out anything to the command line to tell you if/why it aborts/fails to install.

[Scott_Richardson]

Bill is correct that nipkg.exe has the --allow-uninstall option but installers do not and as a result return error code -125813, which is that packages must be removed before completing the installation. I am not aware of any workaround for this current behavior.

The only option that I can suggest is to script the removal of the conflicting packages using nipkg.exe before installing.

[Mahatma_Andy]

I miss the good old /generatespecfile switch to the setup.exe. It was easy to select products and their options, it was clear what got selected to install and it was done in minutes. I'm struggling to get anywhere now for days.

I also tried to install selected packages separately but failed because I don't know the dependencies of the packages and most of them failed to install because of unmet dependencies.

My use case is the following:

I have a system with LabView 2018 SP1 f4 and drivers May 2018. The second development environment installed is LabVIEW 2016. There is a subset of drivers that I need and only these are installed.

Now I want to upgrade to LabVIEW 2020 SP1 keeping LabVIEW 2018 installation and override the drivers with those from Driver Suite July 2020. LabVIEW 2016 gets obsolete doing this and so will be uninstalled afterwards (or beforehand).

[Mahatma_Andy]

Perhaps it's the best to ask the support team to assist me for my use case. There must be an easy way deploying these things silently in a network without internet connection.

[Scott_Richardson]

Contacting support could end up just come back to the NI Package Manager team that I work with. NIPM will consider changing the default behavior to allow removal in non-interactive modes, potentially in an upcoming release.

It might be helpful to know what packages are listed in the GUI as being required to remove when you are doing the install.

I think the options that you have are one of the following:

1) Determine the list of top-level packages requiring removal and issue a script command using nipkg.exe to remove them prior to initiating the install directly with the installer.

2) Instead of using the installer directly, create a script to do the install of the products of interest using nipkg.exe and use option to allow removal of packages. The script would need to register all the feeds for the installer, install the product packages from the feeds included any recommended packages, and then unregister the feeds.

[Mahatma_Andy]

Hi Scott,

I will try to do the install with the feed method. The packages which need removal can be different on different workstations as developers in our company add drivers/products they need for their personal workstation in some cases. So it's impossible to determine which packages need removal for every individual workstation.

I'll dig into the feed method the next weeks and report back. Thanks.