Hacker News Reader

Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

I haven't had the misfortune to have to repackage other apps for SCCM, but I have had the misfortune to create MSI installers for several apps.

It's horrible. MSI is so complex, and there are constraints, limitations and oddities at every twist and turn.

I love Windows for desktops, but my all time favourite item on my wishlist is for Microsoft to completely revamp how software is installed, from scratch, to improve things. I really mean from scratch - I know Microsoft like every new thing they do to be compatible all the way back to Windows 3.1, but no, really, from scratch!

View on HN

Well that's what the windows store was meant to do but then they added a pay toll, limited it to apps that could run on a fraction of the machines deployed, so it never took off.

But agree, there should be no need to things like docker if apps were sufficiently compartimented and explicit about their requirements.

I recently went down this path. I discovered the WiX MSI toolkit and it was very smooth. If you ever find yourself needing to create an installer and haven’t used it, give it a look. It can install dependencies, customize the UI, create/start/stop/remove Windows services, configure IIS websites, and run custom actions.

It’s all done via declarative XML and made my life much easier.

WiX is great tool but a bit steep learning curve because it won't abstract MSI spec so I need to learn MSI spec.

It is powerful, but the curve is really steep, and it is still subject to the seemingly random, myriad of constraints and limitations - for example, there is a whole class of variables that you can only write to at certain stages in the install process.

The last MSI installer I wrote had to install 2 Windows services, write to the registry, grant file system access rights, and install a minifilter driver. There was a lot of swearing, and I was really close to launching my laptop out of a Window several times. It was a very unhappy period of my life, and if I never have to write another MSI installer, it will be too soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com