[Python-Dev] [Python-3000] 2.6.1 and 3.0 (original) (raw)

Elliot Murphy elliot at canonical.com
Wed Nov 26 21:20:05 CET 2008

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

I'm sure the Python Software Foundation would easily get a free license of one of the good commercial MSI installer generators. Can you recommend a specific one? In addition, I'm also skeptical wrt. commercial setup tools. We had been using Wise for a while, and it was a management problem because the license was only available on a single machine - so it was difficult for anybody else to jump in and do a release.

I've also had terrible times with installshield and other things in the past, but I've been very very pleased with WiX:

http://wix.sourceforge.net/

Free, open source, and it gave me absolute control over how the MSI and MSM modules were built, using text files so I could store them in version control, spit out installers from our automated build, etc. The source format is XML (shrug), so on that project we even wrote a WiX parser to calculate SCons dependencies all the way through the MSM to the MSI, so that we could tell when a source file was changed what installers needed to be resigned and shipped to customers.

It's really nice to be able to code review installer changes, and to have automated builds spit out .msi files alongside the .debs and .rpms and more.

-- Elliot Murphy | https://launchpad.net/~statik/

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