Blair,

Thanks for a suggestion. I wasn't aware that such a tool is already
shipped with Windows. I'll definitely give it a try.
Do you happen to know if it does have any prerequisites regarding a
target system? (like certain version of msiexec, MFC libraries, .NET
framework...). That is - can I assume that this will work on a clean
installation of windows XP (without any patches, service packs,
possibly also stripped down of some functionality by the user)

I think that error reporting from iexpress tool shouldn't be much of a
problem, as long as it doesn't produce incomplete executables (if it
doesn't build anything - lack of certain artifact would eventually
stop the build process). Same goes for installing - I can check (and
in fact I already do) if embedded setup installed correctly.

However - if there still is an easy way to achieve what I need in MSI,
it would be nice. Switching from MSI to an ordinary executable
requires quite a bunch of changes in other places, since I have
already other projects (mostly other installers) which use my wrapped
.msi as a prerequisite.

Regards,
Mateusz


2009/8/30  <wix-users-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net>:
> From: "Blair" <os...@live.com>
> To: "'General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.'" 
> <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net>
> Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:03:50 -0700
> Subject: Re: [WiX-users] MSI wrapper for .exe setup
> If your wrapper doesn't have to be MSI, I would recommend iexpress. It can
> be scripted in a build environment, it supports compressing/extracting any
> number of files (as a single group) and calling any arbitrary executable
> with arbitrary parameters (which I don't believe are configurable at
> runtime). And, it comes "built-in" on all recent versions of Windows.
>
> There is basically no documentation I have discovered for it, but if you run
> iexpress.exe it allows you to generate a SED file. Once you have created
> that file (it is an INI-style text file, so it can be included in your
> source control and can be maintained with any text editor) you build using
> the following command-line:
>
> iexpress /N /Q <SED-filename>
>
> (...)
> The biggest problems I have had with it are 1) it doesn't (as of the last
> time I used it) report errors in a build-server-friendly way (via the exit
> code); 2) I never found a way to suppress the extraction dialog (but it goes
> away as soon as the files are extracted, it isn't modal); and 3) there is
> virtually no documentation on the SED file format.
>(...)

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