MSI Cygwin installer

[Tristan Juricek <Tjuricek at mohomine dot com>]

Title: MSI Cygwin installer

Hello, I'm new to this list, and a cursory search for "MSI" brought up only one item.

A little background: My company currently is using Cygwin's toolset as a replacement for the Visual Studio build environment.  It's my job to manage the distribution.  We are also looking into possibly packing up some of the tools with our product as well.

I've been wondering if anyone has considered or has worked on a Cygwin MSI installer.  Though there are some restrictions and it may be more difficult to automate, the administrative capabilities more than make up for it (at least for my tasks).  I'm going ahead and wrapping the installers myself for our internal usage, but I'd also like to gauge interest in developing an MSI-based installation system.

The main task would be setting up the mechanism for actually generating the compiled msi and msm files.  The SDK provides basic facilities, but using a scripting tool like Wise For Windows Installer (I personally can't stand ISWI) is a tremendous time saver.  Nonetheless, I don't know of any free tools for compiling msi files.  Generating a new set of free tools to compile those files may require a bit of work.

Right now, for my company's internal installer, I've moved to the following setup:
1. Each tarfile that comprises part of the distribution gets repackaged into a merge module (msm).
2. There is an msi installer for each one of the "logical" groupings of packages - base, devel, admin, archive, etc.
3. There is a final single msi installer that calls the logical group installers via an embedded custom action.

This setup allows for the ability to patch in new versions of the different tools quickly.  However, you still need to have the set of available tools compiled into the installer itself - I don't know if it's even possible to add components and features while attempting an installation.

In any case, I'd like to hear opinions or ideas about setting up a new MSI-based installation system.  Especially if anyone would be interested in using or developing this kind of effort.

Thanks,
Tristan

PS - Microsoft's documentation page for reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp (Setup and System Administration -> Setup -> Windows Installer -> SDK Documentation -> Windows Installer)

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Tristan Juricek

tjuricek@mohomine.com
858-362-3047