bzr-windows team mailing list archive

[Alexander Belchenko <bialix@xxxxxxx>]

Ian Clatworthy пишет:
> Assuming everyone who wanted to voice an opinion on what installers are
> required has done so, the time has come IMO for some follow-up action.
> Here are the next steps I'd like to see happen:

> 2. We select the installer technology. (InnoSetup seems a popular choice
>    though I'm not sure if it can build msi-style installers or just
>    stand-alone exe ones.)

So, the battle MSI vs Inno Setup has begun! Let's try to summarize pros 
and cons.

Pros:

a) MSI is blessed technology for MS Windows. Although many people 
familiar with setup.exe installers based on Inno Setup or NSIS.
b) MSI allows easier deployment of applications via Active Directory 
service (I'm not expert here).
c) MSI supports IIUC hierarchical components lists and this is useful 
for selecting which plugins user want to install. Inno has problems with 
this but one need to dig this problem a bit deeper to say last word.

Cons:

d) Somebody should write new installer based on MSI and provide most of 
Inno Setup features, especially for updating the $PATH environment 
variable after install. Once it will be written then maintaining stuff 
should not be too hard, at least Inno installer has no problems with it.
e) Although I found documentation on WiX is very complicated. Inno Setup 
has very good documentation, it is much easier to grok and use.
f) Inno uses very progressive lzma compression while MSI IIUC uses lzw 
compression. So it seems Inno can win in resulting size.


So, only b and c above is real benefits of MSI, and I'm not really sure 
about c.

Serious obstacle here is d: there is need in some good expert in MSI 
and/or WiX to start this work.

What I'm missing?