How do I view and disable unwanted crap in the CS5 installer

Question

I'm running the trial installer, and I noticed Adobe has become even more creative with hiding away all its silent-and-utterly-unnecessary payloads. In addition to defining required components in the proxy.xml files like for CS3 and CS4, there's now also a "Media_db.db" SQLite3 database with all payloads and dependencies that needs to be modified... and in the mean time no one bothered to actually fix the installer to offer us ways to not install things we don't want in the slightest.
To adobe in general: I want to install what *I* want to install, not what you want to install on my computers. I don't want AIR, and Media Player, and your own flavour of a JRE, and... well basically of the 1.5Gb your Photoshop CS5 installer wants me to install, I only need 500Mb (namely: photoshop, cmap, type support, xmp and the required fonts and color profiles). How do I turn the rest of the payloads off?
Can we get someone who wrote the installer for this -quite frankly wonderful- program on the line so that they can tell us all how we can actually control the install process so that it does NOT install all the stuff Adobe wants to force onto our systems?

Answer 1

Hello. I’m the engineering manager for the Creative Suite and also responsible for the installation technology.
There’s lots of topics here, so let me try to address them one at a time.
First, our guiding principle for CS5 installers was to fix the top call generators for CS4 so that the installer succeeded more frequently. In addition, we made some significant architectural changes to better enable volume deployment scenarios. There is still a long way to go before the installers are perfect; but, gauging from the overall number of customer escalations over the past days since shipping we did succeed at dramatically reducing the number of customer escalations. Volume deployment tools are not yet released and we’ll see if those help volume deployment scenarios shortly. I’m not sure from where you heard the installers were going to be revamped from the bottom up. That’s never been the plan.
Adobe has become even more creative with hiding away all its silent-and-utterly-unnecessary payloads
The intent is to make the most common installation scenarios very simple, with a second goal to give the user as much configurability as we safely can. We’re not actually *trying* to hide anything. You can find the list of payloads and their use here:
http://blogs.adobe.com/OOBE/2010/05/cs5_payloads.html
The actual way that dependencies are determined is that each product lists its own subcomponents and how strong of a dependency that product has on each subcomponent. Subcomponents that are deemed “Critical” or “Required” do not show up as deselectable. Subcomponents that are “Recommended” or “Optional” do show up as deselectable. It sounds like the root disagreement here is the definition of what payloads should be Critical or Required vs. Recommended or Optional. Here’s the definition of the different dependency levels:
Critical –The product will not successfully launch without this payload.
Required - Without this payload the product’s primary functionality will not work as expected. The trick is defining what “primary functionality” means. Each product defines this on their own.
Recommended – Tertiary functionality does not work if this payload is not deployed.
Optional – There is no interactivity between the component and the product. Not installing the component should not adversely affect the product.
For Photoshop CS5, the installer includes six Recommended or Optional payloads: Extension Manager, ExtendScript Toolkit, Device Central, AIR, Media Player, and Fonts Recommended. Deselecting any one of them should result in that component NOT being installed. I just ran the Photoshop CS5 installer on a Windows XP system after deselecting each one of those six components and verified that indeed none of them were installed. (Note, I already had AIR on the system so I cannot really verify that AIR didn’t get installed in this particular install instance.)
Even deselecting all six leaves almost 1.5 GB to be installed. One could easily argue that many payloads marked as Critical or Required should instead be Recommended, such as Bridge. You have a valid point there.
The JRE point is an interesting one. In CS4 there were multiple copies (6, if memory serves) of the JRE being installed. Customers (and I) just didn’t know about it. Many different products just included the JRE as part of their product folder. In fact, Dreamweaver still does this today. We’ve pulled the other copies into one common payload. So now there are only two copies of the JRE being installed, the common one and the Dreamweaver one. The reason we tried to reduce the number of JREs installed is to reduce the cost in disk space to the customer as well as be able to more adequately address security vulnerabilities if one should occur within the JRE. These are all just normal JREs from Sun and haven’t been tweaked in any way; but, we need a known version to ensure the products keep running properly. If we just leverage the system version (on Mac) or a common version across the system (on Win) then we’ve encountered numerous customer escalations when the JRE is updated on that system.
Bridge in the Suite install case is also interesting. Because Photoshop has a Required dependency on Bridge, if you deselect Bridge with another product but then have Photoshop selected for install then Bridge will still be installed.
Can we get someone who wrote the installer for this -quite frankly wonderful- program on the line so that they can tell us all how we can actually control the install process so that it does NOT install all the stuff Adobe wants to force onto our systems?
I’ll try to dig up some instructions. Using the upcoming enterprise deployment toolkit is one method; but, that’s not going to be available for at least a few more weeks. It may take a few days to post instructions since we have to test the instructions before posting them. Note also that the product teams have not tested any configuration where the Critical and Required payloads are not installed, so the products may not function properly.
When I do get the instructions I’ll post them at this blog:
http://blogs.adobe.com/OOBE/
Thanks,
--Eric ([email protected])