The windows installer code (from Russel?) developed years ago depends on winzipse, which requires a license. While it is not expensive, these days there are free alternatives such as NSIS, which is quite mature and used to generating windows installers of many windows builds of open-source software - e.g. R, Mono, GPG etc. Target this for the next release (9.0), hopefully.
I was wrong, R uses Innosetup (also open-source?, or free use in any case) to build its windows installer. But lilypond uses nsis.
One advantage (major?) is that nsis support lzma, which gives a 15% smaller size compared to winzipse; also it is script-driven and customization turn-around is much quicker, once one is used to the scripting language itself.
Here is the script (put it under the code directory and and run "makensis nsisinst.nsi" should do it after a build): http://www.ghostscript.com/~hintak/nsisinst.nsi Here are two installers one new, one old for comparison: http://www.ghostscript.com/~hintak/GS872W32-r11356+tt-nsis.exe http://www.ghostscript.com/~hintak/GS872W32-r11356+tt.exe The size advantage is 20%+ . It is feature-complete AFAIK: it optionally scan %WINDOWS%\fonts to create cidfmap; it creates a few start-menu entries and a few registry keys for gsview's use. Some of the latter are not optional yet, unlike the winzipse-based installer. Other advantages over the winzipse-based installer are: - supports silent installation (/S) - easily customizable (e.g. ships with a different license is just replacing the license file and re-run makensis) - has a more modern interface? etc I'll tidy up, update doc/Make.htm, and hook it up with a new "nmake -f psi/msvc32.mak nsis" target before closing.
One of the reasons is that the WINDOWS SDK manifest manipulation tool mt.exe (requires for setupgs.exe's privilege escalation to install to "c:\program files" under Vista/win7) malfunctions under wine: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22813 But that's not very important one - few would want to build win32 ghostscript with MSVC under wine.
Add doc, the script itself, and a make/nmake 'nsis' target (either msvc or borland) in r11404 . I'll possibly continue to make a few more changes, and make some snapshot builds available from time to time.