[RajT88]

Can confirm. I would be considered by most to have been a Windows Installer expert at one point. Installshield / Wix / Whatever else.

It is intentionally obtuse at times (MSIFileHash table uses rearranged MD5 hashes for example), and also many features made sense for the late 90's/Early 2000's era where bandwidth was low and connectivity limited, and lots of stuff was distributed on CD's. The look on people's faces when you explain advertisement to them the first time... How their unrelated app can get stuck in a loop of repair for a piece of unrelated software...

It was deprecated by the newer AppX/MSIx/AppV format which uses sandboxes, binary chunks/streaming and no executable code to install stuff.

For my own desktop computing, I prefer MSI packages because I prefer having control post-install to tinker with things if I feel like it. Also, I have the skillset to modify the installer to my whims if I so choose.

[ripley12]

> It was deprecated by the newer AppX/MSIx/AppV format which uses sandboxes, binary chunks/streaming and no executable code to install stuff.

I can offer a little perspective on MSIX, having devoted months of my life to it in a past job.

MSIX is nearly unusable outside the Store. It will work in a tightly controlled environment, but when you try to deploy it to a wide variety of users you will run into 1) unhelpful errors that basically can't be diagnosed, 2) enterprise environments that cannot/will not allow MSIX installs. I get the impression that the MSIX team is uninterested in solving either of those issues.

It's not a coincidence that virtually no first-party teams use MSIX to install their product outside the Store. Office tried for a while and eventually gave up.

Despite all that, there are still a few people at MS who will tell you that MSIX is the future. I don't really understand it and I assume there's a weird political reason for this.

[mike_hearn]

MSIX can be made to work in that context. We've done it, although it required writing our own installer EXE stub that invokes the package management API rather than using Microsoft's own "App Installer" app, and doing lots of remote diagnosis to solve the mysterious bugs you were hitting. I would indeed not recommend anyone try to use it with Microsoft's own tooling.

Still, when you finally make it work you get a lot of benefits. MSI is clearly dead end tech which is why so many MSIs are just installer EXEs wrapped in the file format. It doesn't have any clear path to modern essentials like online updates, keeping the OS clean, sandboxing and so on. If you were on the Windows team, what would you say the future was?

For enterprise environments it's actually somewhat the opposite: MSIX packages can be installed without admin privileges due to their declarative nature, and it's very easy for admins to provision MSIXs to Active Directory groups because they don't have to do any repackaging work. Yes, some admins have hacked Windows to stop it working because when MS launched the Store they didn't provide any way for admins to opt out, but these days they have the knobs they need. Also, because they're just zips you can always just unzip them into your home directory to get at the app inside. It won't auto update that way, but as long as EXEs can run from the home dir it can work.

Products like Office and Visual Studio have entire teams devoted to nothing but their installers, which is clearly going too far in the opposite direction. Most products won't want to do that.

[jjcoffman]

Orca ftw

[RajT88]

If you go way down the rabbit hole, you end up at modifying OpenMCDF.