I'm afraid a vendor that big, Vectorworks aka minicad, is not going to feel pressured that easily, they have after all been around 30 years
J > Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2015 09:54:15 +0100 > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] EXE to MSI > > 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. > > >
