[osgeo4w-dev] Offline installer from cache not working

[BADAWI Marwan]

Hi Jürgen,

First of all thank you so much for taking the time to answer. Unfortunately, I'm still having issues

> Because you didn't create a fresh directory and used the one you already
> populated with everything except qgis-full?   But that's was more of a side
> note.

I did create a fresh cache folder, and it only contained qgis-full with none of its dependencies.

> My main point was that you didn't specify a --local-package-dir in your offline install.

Good catch! How did I miss that? And how was the installer finding the cache folder anyway?!
Anyway, I fixed it but the install still doesn't complete successfully and the shortcuts for QGIS Desktop and Qt Designer are missing from the start menu (but the others are there: OSGeo4W Shell, SAGA and Setup). Same result I had before...

Here is the full process I am running:
1 - Perform an express install and select QGIS and GDAL components. Everything is working and this is what I am trying to reproduce (if there is an easier way to duplicate this, I am all for it).
2 - Recover the installed.db file from that install.
3 - Create an offline cache using the installed.db file and running the following command : osgeo4w-setup.exe --arch x86_64 --quiet-mode --autoaccept --no-desktop --local-package-dir C:\osgeo_cache --packages $(pkg_list) --download --site http://www.norbit.de/osgeo4w/v2 --site http://download.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/v2 --site http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/osgeo/download/osgeo4w/v2
4 - Uninstall the manually installed version
5 - Install with the following command: osgeo4w-setup.exe --arch x86_64 --quiet-mode --autoaccept --no-desktop --local-package-dir C:\osgeo_cache --packages $(pkg_list) --root C:\OSGeo4W --local-install

To make the email clearer I did not expand $(pkg_list) in the commands, but I checked with a diff tool and it is exactly the same in both cases:

arrow-cpp,avce00,base,brotli,c-blosc,cairo,curl,curl-ca-bundle,exiv2,expat,freetype,freexl,gdal,gdal-ecw,gdal-hdf5,gdal-mrsid,gdal-mss,gdal-oracle,gdal-sosi,gdal312-runtime,geographiclib,geos,gpsbabel,grass,grass8,gs,gsl,hdf4,hdf5,laszip,lerc,libarchive,libgeotiff,libharu,libiconv,libjpeg-turbo,libjxl,liblas,libmysql,libpng,libpq,librttopo,libspatialindex,libspatialite,libtiff,libwebp,libxml2,libxslt,libzip,lz4,msodbcsql,msvcrt2019,netcdf,oci,ogdi,opencl,openjpeg,openssl,pdal,pdal-libs,poppler,proj,proj-runtime-data,proj9-runtime,python3-annotated-types,python3-certifi,python3-charset-normalizer,python3-contourpy,python3-core,python3-cycler,python3-duckdb,python3-et-xmlfile,python3-exifread,python3-fonttools,python3-future,python3-gdal,python3-geographiclib,python3-geopandas,python3-httplib2,python3-idna,python3-jinja2,python3-kiwisolver,python3-lxml,python3-markupsafe,python3-matplotlib,python3-mock,python3-narwhals,python3-networkx,python3-nose2,python3-numpy,python3-openpyxl,python3-owslib,python3-packaging,python3-pandas,python3-pillow,python3-pip,python3-plotly,python3-ply,python3-psycopg,python3-psycopg2,python3-pyarrow,python3-pydantic,python3-pydantic-core,python3-pygments,python3-pyodbc,python3-pyogrio,python3-pyopengl,python3-pyparsing,python3-pypdf,python3-pyproj,python3-pyqt6,python3-pyqt6-qscintilla,python3-pyqt6-sip,python3-pyqt6-webengine,python3-pyserial,python3-python-dateutil,python3-pytz,python3-pywin32,python3-pyyaml,python3-remotior-sensus,python3-reportlab,python3-requests,python3-scipy,python3-setuptools,python3-shapely,python3-simplejson,python3-sip,python3-six,python3-typing-extensions,python3-typing-inspection,python3-tzdata,python3-urllib3,python3-wxpython,python3-xlrd,python3-xlwt,qca-qt6,qgis,qgis-common,qgis-full,qgis-full-free,qgis-grass-plugin,qgis-oracle-provider,qscintilla-qt6,qt6-libs,qt6-qml,qt6-tools,qtkeychain-qt6-libs,qwt-qt6-libs,saga,setup,sfcgal,sqlite3,szip,thrift,wxwidgets,xerces-c,xz,zlib,zstd