There are devel tools available from http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/msi/setup/windows_installer_development_tools.asp. Perhaps these would work with Wine. http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/archive/2003/11/25/56510.aspx is also interesting. The main question is if we *want* MSI. The discussion on the Inno Setup mailing lists indicates that MSI is an endless source of problems. OTOH, Python 2.4 is now delivered as an MSI, and they claim that this is superior. What would be really cool would be a rpm2msi, written in Python :-)
For reference, here [1] is an open source project with tools to generate MSI packages. The project has been around since 2004 and is still active. [1] http://wixtoolset.org/
And now there are tools on Linux as well: https://wiki.gnome.org/msitools They are compatible with WiX, which means we could use msitools for our builds and WiX for the customizer.
Microsoft's sales pitch for MSI: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb742606.aspx
Microsoft now prefers .Appx bundles. They are normally used for Microsoft Store, so it is unclear what limitations they might have. E.g. only managed applications, and only Windows 10?
We should probably look at MSIX, it seems to be the successor of MSI: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/overview However, there are some potential problem areas, especially regarding file associations and the fact that MSIX apps run in a containerized environment: https://www.advancedinstaller.com/msix-limitations.html
As of bug 8297 we have dropped support for Windows versions older than Windows 10, that helps in the choice of installer & packaging method.
For MSIX packages to be accepted in Microsoft Store - we can't target too old windows versions: https://www.advancedinstaller.com/msix-publish-microsoft-store.html It seems MSIX would also solve bug 8301.
