Literature concerning the creation of installers

is there any good literature (or other sources of information) covering the creation of installer systems? We already selected 5 different products (e.g. IzPack, InstallBuilder, ...) we want to prototype with and are currently looking for some more informati开发者_如何学运维on regarding best practices and how to tackle a thing like that. Thanks already for the answers.

Many of the installer systems try to abstract the differences among various target operating systems (Windows 7, Vista, Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP, etc.) so that you can concentrate on simply packaging your product. Sometimes the installers do this well, other times they fail miserably. Try to find out where the installers abstractions are incomplete and create target-specific code using specific operating system packaging guides.

For example, your installer may need to run a script using the account credentials of a user other than the one being used to run the installer. This might not be well supported on all operating systems by the installer framework.

Also recognize that some users/customers would prefer purely native installation objects (RPM, DEB, MSI, etc.) which can be integrated with their own deployment and/or automation tools.