I was one of the people that tried to do an official msi, but the hurdle was just too great to overcome. It seems every few years I have to write one of these explanation of why an official msi doesn't exist... You can read the bug, but the condensed version is.. Here goes. First there was not much interest from Mozilla, because enteprise. The wiX project just started and immature and was basically a toy at the time. There was a chicken and egg problem in that moz only accepted a solution if it was significantly equal in feature to the already mature exe installer. Problem was it was hard to test without replicating their build env. So no one was able to make it work within moZbuild. So, we couldn't make a patch to the build system, and moz wasn't interested without a patch and so on. Also, whatever tool used had to be freely available, and I suspect had to be open sourced.
Early on I did submit an attempt, and I believe it is still attached in my reply to the bug. it used makemsi as it was the only command line driven msi packer that was usable at the time. Daniel is right, We know a lot of large companies packaging their own msi. But no one has ever shared any code probably because everyone are just using the capture method through a gui. Note that even in my msi, I have a dll to replicate the install and uninstall logic to be as close to the official method as possible. Eventually, I used all that knowledge to create the FrontMotion msi packages. I can only see a few ways to move forward based on comments in the bug. We need someone who knows how the build system works and where the integration points are in CI so we can start stubbing out the msi builder as an alternate to the exe. This way we can have a patch that "turns on msi installer". Basically make "../mach msi" or something similar work. We need someone who can help us include wix or makemsi into a test moztools, so that people have the right tools. Also Someone needs to get permission or license to redist the tool. I don't see moz spending engineering time to help us with any of that. Making the msi is actually the easy part. Those are my two cents and observation. -Eric Sent from my iPhone On Mar 18, 2016, at 4:14 AM, "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: My thoughts on this. I have been doing MSI and AppV-packaging for appx 15 years or so now and the applications which can’t be repackaged or has been restricted (usually from a support perspective) when talking to the vendor is counted on my fingers of my two hands. Repackaging Firefox in MSI or AppV is probably one of the easiest things you can do, it doesn’t require any specific high level packaging skills. I do however agree that packaging is an art when it comes to the more complex application installers. Every larger business I’ve come across so far here in Sweden does repackaging of Firefox to AppV or MSI and distributes it via GPO or SCCM, that extra cost could be eliminated for them by having a standardized package. If anyone in the FF-team wants help with guidelines on how to package etc then please let me know and I can help out. Mvh Martin Gustafsson H & M HENNES & MAURITZ AB. IT DEPARTMENT. ÅRSTAÄNGSVÄGEN 13. SE-106 38 STOCKHOLM. SWEDEN. PHONE: +46 8 5780 7478 CELL: +46 703 894509 From: Enterprise [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Wolf, Daniel Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2016 7:00 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; Bradley Amm; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Mozilla Enterprise] Legit Firefox MSI Mozilla is highly unlikely to develop an MSI-based installer. We used to deploy software exclusively in self-built MSIs, but unless you are required to use Group Policy, we’ve found this is a poor practice. We now use the native, fully supported distribution method, which is often EXE. Packaging MSIs is an art, it’s a huge overhead and risk to do it yourself especially when it comes to patching in the future, and developers often include weird actions in their EXE installers you can’t just capture with a registry/filesystem diff. Additionally, repackaging software is often against the EULA. Just some thoughts. Regards, Daniel Wolf From: Enterprise [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2016 5:54 AM To: Bradley Amm <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Mozilla Enterprise] Legit Firefox MSI Hello, The MSI installation technology is not mandatory for SCCM : We deploy Firefox ESR with an SCCM package using the.exe installer. Our installation script mainly launches the command “Firefox Setup 38.7.0esr.exe –ms”. It works to install for the 1st time but also to update an existing Firefox (Very quick installation or update: not like MSI…) For corporate settings we have another SCCM package using some corporate internal tools (.vbs scripts) so that we can set or reset all user profiles on all machines. This way the main Firefox installation/update package is very easy to update: just change the Firefox Setup xx.x.xesr.exe and re-deploy it. From: Enterprise [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bradley Amm Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2016 02:19 To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [Mozilla Enterprise] Legit Firefox MSI Hello Guys and Girls Is there an Official repo of MSI’s to deploy Firefox with via SCCM. Our official policy is to get MSI’s from the software maker direct instead of using third party sites or makers so using MSI’s downloaded from Front Motion won’t be allowed on our network due to concerns with Virus/Malware etc. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ce message et ses pieces jointes peuvent contenir des informations confidentielles ou privilegiees et ne doivent donc pas etre diffuses, exploites ou copies sans autorisation. Si vous avez recu ce message par erreur, veuillez le signaler a l'expediteur et le detruire ainsi que les pieces jointes. 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