On Friday, 9 December 2016 at 10:35:00 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
On Thursday, 8 December 2016 at 20:04:01 UTC, Jesse Phillips
wrote:
These sequences can call "Custom Actions" which are just table
entries that point to a DLL (there is more to Custom Actions).
Why not just unpack the stuff and run a configuration program?
The latter would be useful anyway.
An MSI can't execute an arbitrary executable, just an arbitrary
DLL which could run an arbitrary executable :) If you're running
an MSI for security you're screwed.
Now if you're question is why not forgo the MSI and create a
self-extracting archive which runs a post "install"
configuration, well then you're writing your own installer and
will need to fully handle upgrades and uninstall (I say fully
since even with an MSI there is still uninstall steps you must
specify, but generally only if you're doing special install steps
that need to be undone)
To me an MSI is a weird complicated mess, but I'm kind of
interested to dig in and understand how the MSIexec reads and
processes the DB (beyond the basics).
