[Python-Dev] [Python-3000] Python 2.6 and 3.0

[Mark Hammond]

> Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> > I've looked at it, and I seriously doubt that. In WiX, you need to
> > specify a fixed file list (perhaps with wildcards; I'm unsure). This
> > will be tricky for Python, where the list of files to be installed
> > changes all the time.
> >
> > You *need* to have a turing-complete packing language (such as
> Python).
> 
> You are most likely right. A pure XML based solution ain't going to
> work
> for Python. But how about a mixed solution?
> 
>     XML templates -> Python fu -> WiX XML -> MSI
> 
> We take some XML templates, modify them from Python and add the files.
> Finalliy we let WiX create the MSI installer from the resulting XML
> file.
> 
> What do you think?

I'm inclined to agree with Martin that WiX doesn't offer us much value (it
offers value in many places though - just not for our requirements given
Martin's msilib).  I believe that once we know how to solve a particular
problem, it would not be significantly easier to implement using WiX than it
would using the current infrastructure.  My problem is still getting my head
around various MSI issues at any level (eg, bdist_msi needs some tweaking to
allow for different releases of the same "package" to be recognized as such,
but I'm not sure what MSI concept I'm dealing with yet...)

WiX is an excellent inspiration though - if a WiX example can be found for
something, it should be a significant help in implementing it via msilib.

Cheers,

Mark