Have you tried using the -cc and -reusecab switches with light.exe? 

Palbinder Sandher 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Ondrej Zarevucky [mailto:ondrej.zarevu...@fine.cz] 
Sent: 26 January 2010 14:30
To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Light: Skip cabinet creation

Thank you Blair for such quick answer.

We are packaging manually beacuse we are reusing CAB files for more MSI 
packages. Some of these packages do not reference all the files in each of the 
shared CAB files and it would be hard to select which CAB to use.
Example layout:
ProgramOne.msi:
- ProgramOne.cab
- SharedLibs.cab
ProgramTwo.msi
- ProgramTwo.cab
- SharedLibs.cab (same)
... + more programs each using SharedLibs.cab

Using manually packaged shared cabinets for shared libraries allows us to 
deliver our users smaller updates as the shared libraries are downloaded only 
once for all the programs. Because we already have the packaging code written 
we are also manually packaging the program cabinets using the same code.

Because of this we don't need Light to create the Cabinet files, just the MSI 
file with properly generated Media and File tables. As far as I know Windows 
Installer find files in cabinets using their IDs and I didn't find any problems 
with cabinets files having more files then referenced in the MSI database.

I've located one single line of source code, which when commented out would 
disable adding files to cabinets, but it would require me to recompile thw 
whole WiX package... Not an easy job to do :( (Empty cabinet files are much 
better then hundreds of MBs of uncompressed data copied on each Installation 
build)

(from 3.0.5419 source)
CabinetBuilder.cs:164:      cab.AddFile(fileRow.Source, fileRow.File);

Ondřej Zarevúcky

On 26.1.2010 14:52, Blair wrote:
> One way is to turn off all compression in your authoring, and then update the 
> Media table after you create the cabinets, but you noticed that that results 
> in the files still being laid out (copied).
>
> You could (somehow) pre-calculate the final cabinet file order and place the 
> cab files in their "smart-cabbing" locations. If the cabinet file contents 
> aren't different they won't be recabbed.
>
> I don't know what you are gaining by packaging the files "manually" yourself 
> using CABARC, however, since the exact same cabinet creation code is used by 
> light.exe as cabarc.exe uses to create cabinet files.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ondrej Zarevucky [mailto:ondrej.zarevu...@fine.cz]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 5:12 AM
> To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.
> Subject: [WiX-users] Light: Skip cabinet creation
>
> Hi,
> I have a bit weird question/feature request:
> - Is there a way, how to skip cabinet creation? I would like Light to 
> create only the MSI package.
>
> We are packaging all the files manually using CABARC from "Microsoft 
> Cabinet Software Development Kit" and it takes unnecessary time and 
> disk space to package the cabinet files in Light once more. Even when 
> using Cabinet cache and setting no compression in our<Media ... />  
> elemenets it takes time to copy all the data around our disks.
>
> Thank you for any answer
> Ondřej Zarevúcky
>
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