Just came across this (first MS OSS) project which allows building MSI packages from XML package descriptions:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix
This sounds like a good tool to use as basis for a bdist_msi.
FWIW, this project does the other direction: MSI -> XML
http://msi2xml.sourceforge.net/
M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Just came across this (first MS OSS) project which allows building MSI packages from XML package descriptions:
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix>This sounds like a good tool to use as basis for a bdist_msi.
FWIW, this project does the other direction: MSI -> XML
http://msi2xml.sourceforge.net/
WiX will do MSI->XML as well.
Trent
Trent Mick wrote:
M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Just came across this (first MS OSS) project which allows building MSI packages from XML package descriptions:
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix>This sounds like a good tool to use as basis for a bdist_msi.
FWIW, this project does the other direction: MSI -> XML
http://msi2xml.sourceforge.net/WiX will do MSI->XML as well.
Looking more closely at the msi2xml project page it seems to do XML -> MSI direction as well.
Trent, do you have experience with one of them ? Which is more usable ?
M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Looking more closely at the msi2xml project page it seems to do XML -> MSI direction as well.
Trent, do you have experience with one of them ? Which is more usable ?
WiX was built and is maintained by Microsoft guys (mainly Robert Menching) and is, they say, heavily used inside Microsoft for putting there installer packages together. I've played a little bit with WiX and probably intend to use it for ActivePython (and other installers I author at work) eventually but haven't started really using it yet. I'm pretty confident that WiX is a good way to go. I haven't used msi2xml at all so I can't compare them technically, but the Microsoft usage stories makes me more confident in WiX. A quick look at the msi2xml XML schema gives me the impression that msi2xml would feel a lot more raw where as WiX attempts to put a slight nicer face on the authoring of the database tables that make up an MSI package -- for better or worse. (ASIDE: MySQL is now using WiX for their installers.)
WiX blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/category/4625.aspx Rob's personal blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/
Cheers, Trent
Trent Mick wrote:
M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Looking more closely at the msi2xml project page it seems to do XML -> MSI direction as well.
Trent, do you have experience with one of them ? Which is more usable ?
WiX was built and is maintained by Microsoft guys (mainly Robert Menching) and is, they say, heavily used inside Microsoft for putting there installer packages together. I've played a little bit with WiX and probably intend to use it for ActivePython (and other installers I author at work) eventually but haven't started really using it yet. I'm pretty confident that WiX is a good way to go. I haven't used msi2xml at all so I can't compare them technically, but the Microsoft usage stories makes me more confident in WiX. A quick look at the msi2xml XML schema gives me the impression that msi2xml would feel a lot more raw where as WiX attempts to put a slight nicer face on the authoring of the database tables that make up an MSI package -- for better or worse. (ASIDE: MySQL is now using WiX for their installers.)
WiX blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/category/4625.aspx Rob's personal blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/
Thanks for the information. Looks like WiX is the way to go then.
Any takers ?
M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
Thanks for the information. Looks like WiX is the way to go then.
Any takers ?
This topic's come up a couple of times on python-dev. MvL's said that it's not worth rewriting Python's installer to use this. But it might be useful as a distutils bdist backend, or alternately a distutils backend could be built on top of MvL's msi code.
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Anthony Baxter -
M.-A. Lemburg -
Trent Mick