Comments on: Apple Safari setup built with WiX

By: Christopher Painter

Christopher Painter — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 04:21:59 +0000

MSI doesn’t really have a proper fully featured bootstrapper. This has been historically left up to tools vendors but based on the changing attitudes towards merge modules and concurrent installs, I expect MSI will be addressing this story alot more in the next version of MSI ( 4.x maybe? ) very soon but that it’ll still be up to the tools vendors to implement the patterns.

By: Bob Arnson

Bob Arnson — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 03:04:03 +0000

Sorry — WordPress mildly munged the URL. It’s http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368010.aspx without the ending period.

The MSI SDK includes doc about chaining, starting at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372828.aspx . Those topics deal specifically with bootstrapping MSI but the principles are the same with multiple MSI packages.

By: Dirk

Dirk — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:54:49 +0000

The behavior is definitely deprecated (link didn’t work), but is there documentation (i.e. from MS) on how to ‘correctly’ implement a multiple MSI install and/or chainer?

By: Bob Arnson

Bob Arnson — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 01:13:53 +0000

The ability to install another package from a custom action is deprecated. (See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368010.aspx.) Apple worked around that in its CA by sequencing it in the UI sequence only so basic/silent UI modes will never install it. A chainer is a separate executable that avoids those problems.

VBScript is great for prototyping CAs but should never go outside the walls. VBScript is too fragile, something Apple knows about. (See http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304405.) Given that other Apple products on Windows RTM’d with VBScript, I’m not confident it’ll go away, except by pointing out the problem.

Apple is all about the user experience and setup is the user’s first experience (especially on Windows) (and even on OSX). Taking shortcuts for the sake of quicker delivery can kill the experience.

By: Dirk

Dirk — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:35:26 +0000

I did my own spelunking and the package seems to contain a second executable (called by a custom action) that installs Apple Software Update. Does that not qualify as a chainer?

Also, keep in mind that this is a beta release. VBScript is great for quick development and perhaps they will move away from it if/when a final version is delivered.