Thank you Blair for such quick answer.

We are packaging manually beacuse we are reusing CAB files for more MSI 
packages. Some of these packages do not reference all the files in each 
of the shared CAB files and it would be hard to select which CAB to use.
Example layout:
ProgramOne.msi:
- ProgramOne.cab
- SharedLibs.cab
ProgramTwo.msi
- ProgramTwo.cab
- SharedLibs.cab (same)
... + more programs each using SharedLibs.cab

Using manually packaged shared cabinets for shared libraries allows us 
to deliver our users smaller updates as the shared libraries are 
downloaded only once for all the programs. Because we already have the 
packaging code written we are also manually packaging the program 
cabinets using the same code.

Because of this we don't need Light to create the Cabinet files, just 
the MSI file with properly generated Media and File tables. As far as I 
know Windows Installer find files in cabinets using their IDs and I 
didn't find any problems with cabinets files having more files then 
referenced in the MSI database.

I've located one single line of source code, which when commented out 
would disable adding files to cabinets, but it would require me to 
recompile thw whole WiX package... Not an easy job to do :( (Empty 
cabinet files are much better then hundreds of MBs of uncompressed data 
copied on each Installation build)

(from 3.0.5419 source)
CabinetBuilder.cs:164:      cab.AddFile(fileRow.Source, fileRow.File);

Ondřej Zarevúcky

On 26.1.2010 14:52, Blair wrote:
> One way is to turn off all compression in your authoring, and then update the 
> Media table after you create the cabinets, but you noticed that that results 
> in the files still being laid out (copied).
>
> You could (somehow) pre-calculate the final cabinet file order and place the 
> cab files in their "smart-cabbing" locations. If the cabinet file contents 
> aren't different they won't be recabbed.
>
> I don't know what you are gaining by packaging the files "manually" yourself 
> using CABARC, however, since the exact same cabinet creation code is used by 
> light.exe as cabarc.exe uses to create cabinet files.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ondrej Zarevucky [mailto:ondrej.zarevu...@fine.cz]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 5:12 AM
> To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.
> Subject: [WiX-users] Light: Skip cabinet creation
>
> Hi,
> I have a bit weird question/feature request:
> - Is there a way, how to skip cabinet creation? I would like Light to
> create only the MSI package.
>
> We are packaging all the files manually using CABARC from "Microsoft
> Cabinet Software Development Kit" and it takes unnecessary time and disk
> space to package the cabinet files in Light once more. Even when using
> Cabinet cache and setting no compression in our<Media ... />  elemenets
> it takes time to copy all the data around our disks.
>
> Thank you for any answer
> Ondřej Zarevúcky
>
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