[Gpg4win-devel] claws extensions

[Marcus Brinkmann]

Werner Koch wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:50, colin at colino.net said:
> 
>> NSIS has the advantage of being cross-platform (in the sense it
>> builds .exe installers right from Linux). are .msi and WiX the same ?
> 
> WiX is a compiler to create MSI (installers).  However it is not
> complete and the whole MSI stuff is deeply integrated into the COM class
> structure so it is really hard to do all this without Windows.

Last time I tried to run it under mono and wine it failed.  It's worth keeping
an eye on it, but, frankly, even if it works that's not sufficient for a solution.

MSI is a very complex standard, and I doubt it is sufficiently documented and
understandable to be useful for anything but the most basic features.  There are
some nice things that work out of the box, but don't underestimate the cost for
more advanced features.

IMO it's cheaper for us to add missing functions to NSIS, and maybe even to
implement a completely new packaging system.  Tracking installation of
components and files is not a difficult problem for a small contained set of
packages.  It's straightforward to design and implement a simple solution.

Before committing to MSI you really want to understand it better.  Good luck
with that, though!

For example, one thing that is not easy to do in MSI is to automatically install
 dependencies.  The hierarchy in the MSI installer is reverse to what you
expect:  If package A depends on package B, then B needs to be a child of A
rather than the other way round.  If C also depends on B, then you have A->B,
C->B instead of the more straightforward B->A,C.  This doesn't scale well, as it
adds lots of redundancy.  Maybe there is a better solution to this that I don't
know about, but you surely won't find it in the documentation.

MSI installers are difficult enough to write that the only free software for it
comes from a Microsoft employee working on the framework.  Other than that, it's
all about proprietary tools that rake in hundreds or even thousands of euro per
copy.

The main advantage of MSI is that it integrates well with the Windows operating
system.

Thanks,
Marcus