I needed to upgrade to Wix >= 4.x because I want to support creating an installer for Windows on Arm. It is possible to install x64 apps on Windows on Arm, but I would like a native installer if possible.
On Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 1:07 AM 'Fritz Elfert' via Jenkins Developers < [email protected]> wrote: > On 2/22/26 16:40, Alex Earl wrote: > > Hey All, > > > > I've been looking at the Windows installer and thinking about moving it > from Wix, which generates an MSI, to NSIS which generates an exe. The main > reason for the switch is to reduce the complexity of building the > installer. Moving to NSIS would allow building the installer on Linux, > reducing the cost of the infrastructure as the current Wix build requires > the full .NET framework in the build image/VM. I believe all of the > features of the current installer can be easily replicated in NSIS. I'm > wondering if anyone has knowledge of the history of why MSI was chosen in > the first place; if there was a really good reason, I wouldn't want to > stray from that without more consideration. > > > > Thanks, > > > > Alex > > FYI: > You don't need Windows for running WIX. > If you are using WIX 3.x, you can build with WIX on linux by using a > dockerized wix wrapper. There several of them, and it happens that I am the > creator of this one: https://hub.docker.com/r/felfert/wix > I use this almost daily (using podman, instead of docker). > > Regarding why MSI was chosen, i can only guess: Microsoft SCCM (which is > still the mandatory way of Software-deployment in many corporations). > > Cheers > -Fritz > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Jenkins Developers" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/1cebcdbb-d2b1-4a36-9fc8-5773548b39e4%40fritz-elfert.de > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jenkins Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/CAPiUgVc2Ww_nEEt2SCkWAFH716huBSou0TCk4dnhLeBxR-cS8Q%40mail.gmail.com.
