Am 01.01.2015 17:48, schrieb J- P:
I vaguely recall having an application that converted EXE to MSI, but
cant remember it for the life of me.
You have basicly three options:
One method is that such tools run the installer and try to watch what it
does. I found this to be unreliable. They often see registry changes
that were caused by other things running simultaneously, or miss the
install of DLL files which happen to be already installed on the machine
where you build the MSI. Running the same tool several times can give
you different MSI files, some of them work, some don't.
Another method is to script the installer, or build an MSI as a wrapper
around the installer, so it does acutally run the original installer.
Nice, but what about uninstall, update, repair? Some software can be
updated by just running the installer for the new version, some should
better be uninstalled before installing the new version. And eventually
you might want to uninstall it to replace it with some other software.
You end up running a lot of scripts on every boot, each doing some
checks to find out what to do, duplicating the functionality that is
already present in windows installer.
The third method is to manually create an MSI which performs the same
actions as the installer does. This is the cleanest way, gives you a
real MSI with full functionality, such as a repair option, and clean
uninstall.
And option four out of three is to put pressure on the publisher to
deliver an MSI file, or switch to a different product. Hello Mozilla,
I'm looking at you.
