Use WiX Toolset instead of NSIS

[raspi]

The official way for creating installers for Windows is WiX Toolset. Could NSIS be replaced with it?

[mherrmann]

Thank you for the suggestion. What would be the advantage of using WiX over NSIS, besides WiX being "official"? From what I read online, WiX seems to be more difficult to use.

[raspi]

Windows Installer (MSI) creates database driven, transactional installation packages. When written properly a Windows Installer package is very robust, a file gets corrupted/deleted and it will be automatically reinstalled. Windows Installer is aware of UAC and only elevates when required, basically if you're creating software for the corporate market, you will need to provide an MSI.

If comparing to Linux, basically NSIS is creating a .tar.gz package with a binary and some system checks and WiX creates deb/rpm which can check installed libraries and other needed settings.

[mherrmann]

Thank you for the clarification. I appreciate your reply, but must admit I'm sceptical about the very strong statement that "if you're creating software for the corporate market, you will need to provide an MSI". Chrome for Enterprise does offer an MSI installer. But Dropbox for Enterprise seems to use a simple .exe. Also Total Commander, which my file manager competes with, only offers an .exe and is installed on many machines world wide, including inside banks. So is it really that an MSI installer is absolutely, positively required?

[raspi]

In order to use the built-in "Software Installation" Group Policy, you need to have an MSI package ready for deployment. EXE files cannot be deployed using Software Installation.

It's just making sysadmin's job easier.

[milos-korenciak]

(Good news for Linux CI) It seems it could be easily used on Linux also: https://packages.ubuntu.com/eoan/wixl
Anyway - I still wonder if there is similar ecosystem of plugins like in NSIS (https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Category:Plugins) and if it can define imperative logic like NSIS scripts (sometimes it is very helpful to fix strange problems on Windows).