Requirements

Building the Inno installer requires a Windows machine.

The following system dependencies must be installed:

• Inno Setup (http://jrsoftware.org/isdl.php) version 5.4 or newer. Be sure to install the optional Inno Setup Preprocessor feature, which is required.
• Python 3.8+ (to run the packaging.py script)

Building

The packaging.py script automates the process of producing an Inno installer. It manages fetching and configuring non-system dependencies (such as gettext, and various Python packages). It can be run from a basic cmd.exe Window (i.e. activating the MSBuildTools environment is not required).

From the prompt, change to the Mercurial source directory. e.g. cd c:\src\hg.

Next, invoke packaging.py to produce an Inno installer.:

$ py -3 contrib\packaging\packaging.py \
    inno --pyoxidizer-target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

If everything runs as intended, dependencies will be fetched and configured into the build sub-directory, Mercurial will be built, and an installer placed in the dist sub-directory. The final line of output should print the name of the generated installer.

Additional options may be configured. Run packaging.py inno --help to see a list of program flags.

MinGW

It is theoretically possible to generate an installer that uses MinGW. This isn't well tested and packaging.py and may properly support it. See old versions of this file in version control for potentially useful hints as to how to achieve this.