I have seen products which use standard installer toolkits from OS and custom installers. Based on my experience on installers, I tried to summarize the differences between using standard installer and custom installer.
Standard installers can be RPM package mangers (in linux), SD-UX (in HP) and MSI (for Windows) etc., Custom installers can be in-house installers or any 3rd party installers or simple tar/zip package of the product.
The choice of using either a standard installer or a custom installer solely depends on following factors.
1. Multi-platform support. In case the software has to be installed seamlessly on multiple platforms customer installers can help to achieve that. This is the reason most of the open source software delivered in a tar/zip package. If the standard installer has been used one has to re-package the software on the new Operating system or use the package converters.
2. Multiple installations on the same host: If a standard installer has been used to package the product, it is not possible create multiple installations of the same software component as the product uses the same component name. In case of products packaged with custom installers, it is possible to create multiple installations on the same host as they are not registered to OS in its software registry.
While choosing a custom installer, one has to also evaluate whether it is worthwhile building a completely new custom installer or use the 3rd party installer. On the other hand while using a standard installer it is important to check whether a installer framework should be developed which can be used to help package products under multiple platforms.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installation_(computer_programs)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_management_system
http://www.advancedinstaller.com/
http://www.thefreecountry.com/programming/setup.shtml
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