Our installer is written with Inno Setup and we are actually quite happy with it. Yet some customers keep asking for an MSI installer which they could more easily distribute via Active Directory. We have already gone to some lengths to make the installer deal really well with automated and unattended installations by extending Inno Setup’s /LOADINF-mechanism with our own options.
In order to satisfy the customers asking for MSI, I had been thinking about simply wrapping our regular installer inside an MSI, possibly created using WIX. The question is: can I maintain the high configurability which our current installer offers that way? How would I go about exposing the Inno Setup installer’s options through the outer MSI in the unattended/mass installation scenario?
Note that I haven’t really gotten to the point of actually digging into MSI-creation and WIX myself yet. Right now I’m only interested in whether people who do know what they’re talking about think this would be a feasible/sensible approach to invest our energy in in the first place…
[EDIT:] Initially I thought I could do with the temp extraction and execution approach, i.e. the MSI would simply serve as a vessel for delivering the Inno installer to the target PC and executing it there in /VERYSILENT-mode. But I guess the customers who ask for the MSI also want to be able to uninstall or even modify the install from a central location and I guess that won’t be possible in that scenario, would it?
P.S.: We do have an old copy of WISE for MSI here as well but that experience was actually the reason why we started using Inno instead to begin with…
No, there’s no way to do that while still keeping the functionality your customers are ‘implicitly’ asking for. The only ‘wrapping’ in MSI you can do is to extract it on installation and start your InnoSetup installer from the temporary location where you extracted to. MSI is a fundamentally different way of working: InnoSetup (& NSIS & most other installers) take a code-centric approach: you ‘program’ the ‘steps’ to install your data. MSI is a database and takes a ‘data-centric’ approach: you indicate what files should be installed and the MSI ‘runtime’ does the rest. This gives you versioning and exact control of what goes where.
In short, to give your customers what they want (i.e., the ease of deployment that MSI brings with AD), you’ll need ‘proper’ MSI’s. Good luck with that, it’s a major pain IMHO. But it does give good results once you master MSI & WiX.