Is it feasible/sensible to wrap an Inno Setup inst

Question

Our installer is written with Inno Setup and we are actually quite happy with it. Yet some customers keep asking for an MSI installer which they could more easily distribute via Active Directory. We have already gone to some lengths to make the installer deal really well with automated and unattended installations by extending Inno Setup's /LOADINF-mechanism with our own options.

In order to satisfy the customers asking for MSI, I had been thinking about simply wrapping our regular installer inside an MSI, possibly created using WIX. The question is: can I maintain the high configurability which our current installer offers that way? How would I go about exposing the Inno Setup installer's options through the outer MSI in the unattended/mass installation scenario?

Note that I haven't really gotten to the point of actually digging into MSI-creation and WIX myself yet. Right now I'm only interested in whether people who do know what they're talking about think this would be a feasible/sensible approach to invest our energy in in the first place...

[EDIT:] Initially I thought I could do with the temp extraction and execution approach, i.e. the MSI would simply serve as a vessel for delivering the Inno installer to the target PC and executing it there in /VERYSILENT-mode. But I guess the customers who ask for the MSI also want to be able to uninstall or even modify the install from a central location and I guess that won't be possible in that scenario, would it?

P.S.: We do have an old copy of WISE for MSI here as well but that experience was actually the reason why we started using Inno instead to begin with...

Answer 1

No, there's no way to do that while still keeping the functionality your customers are 'implicitly' asking for. The only 'wrapping' in MSI you can do is to extract it on installation and start your InnoSetup installer from the temporary location where you extracted to. MSI is a fundamentally different way of working: InnoSetup (& NSIS & most other installers) take a code-centric approach: you 'program' the 'steps' to install your data. MSI is a database and takes a 'data-centric' approach: you indicate what files should be installed and the MSI 'runtime' does the rest. This gives you versioning and exact control of what goes where.

In short, to give your customers what they want (i.e., the ease of deployment that MSI brings with AD), you'll need 'proper' MSI's. Good luck with that, it's a major pain IMHO. But it does give good results once you master MSI & WiX.

Answer 2

I would argue that it is possible to do all that you would like with an MSI wrapped Inno Setup, but it is far from trivial, and using WiX might make this particular task more difficult. In short I would not really recommend it.

But if you really would like to...

MSI files are simply database files with additional script instructions and often embed the .cab file that contains the stuff you actually want to install.

If you use Wise, you will generate default scripts that you can then add Windows Installer conditions to and control the events to a finer degree (Install, repair, modify, uninstall) so that they call equivalent actions on your Inno Setup install script which would need to be installed into and kept in a temporary folder.

Answer 3

Wrapping an Inno Setup in an MSI package is not a trivial task. However, it is possible. There are lots of free tools out there that can be used to do this. You should choose one that also supports uninstall(s) and upgrades.

I have found only one free tool that supports upgrades and uninstall. Check out http://www.exemsi.com/inno-setup-and-msi

Answer 4

Doing so would be pretty much equivalent to delivering a ZIP file and calling unzip by the end of installation.

With such approach AD and Windows Installer would be fooled as if dealing with proper MSI installation, but as it is not the case, they'd backfire on you on the very first occasion.

Don't go this way.

And WiX is superior toolset to InnoSetup, anyway, so the time you'll spend on learning and porting will pay off by better support of collaboration.