We build a bunch of products that all have a similar structure, and in fact share installed subdirectories, documentation and various system configuration variables (environment variables, start menu items, ...)
We've been using InstallShield. It works, but it is incredibly painful to configure a product installer one mouse click at a time, especially when the other installers already have 90% the same configuration.
As programmers, we're used to subroutines to do common work. Why shouldn't this idea apply to installers?
Is there an easy way to configure a subset of installed features and use them across a set of InstallShield installers?
As an alternative, we've been considering using NSIS on the grounds that the shared logic can be broken out as a subroutine(?) or a macro even if we have to implement the macro expansion logic. Does anybody have an experience or recommendations here? Does NSIS have any capability shortcomings as an installer compared to InstallShield?