6 ms·
This is a little bit surprising to me, at $DAYJOB i had some requests for an MSI installer. I knew there's some AD/GPO features or whatever but your level of se
by mappu 7y ago
This is a little bit surprising to me, at $DAYJOB i had some requests for an MSI installer. I knew there's some AD/GPO features or whatever but your level of seriousness here is unexpected.
Is it really easier to install compared to an exe installer (say nsis / inno-based)? How so?
- mavhc 7y agoWay easier with the default tools. Companies with money will buy sccm etc. But for those orgs without, MSI or writing a script are the only default options. And scripts are unreliable
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoImagine the difference between software distributed as a tarball and the binary package. Both totally work, but one is so much easier to deploy in bulk. (This is obviously a very loose analogy, but I think it's roughly correct)
- mixmastamyk 7y agoExe installers support unattended, headless installs with a command line switch.
- mavhc 7y agoBut how you do run that command only once on every computer? Including ones that are currently not in the building, or on.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoSame way as anything, use group policy or a login script that checks first.
- mavhc 7y agoBut how do you know if it's installed correctly?
- mixmastamyk 7y agoWhat does correctly mean? On windows usually a registry key is checked.
- mavhc 7y agoExactly, changes from software to software. And how to uninstall? Much easier to add an MSI to GPO, and then just as easy to remove it again and it's uninstalled. Not sure how writing scripts to do all that myself for every piece of software is better.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoMsi is deprecated.
- mavhc 7y agoSo you keep saying, although don't see any evidence for it. MS want you to move to using the MS Store, because that's not terrible. Or manually download multiple files, put them all in specific places and use a powershell script to install it, hah, so easy. MSIX is just a wrapper around an msi, exe, etc installer anyway. In conclusion, just make an MSI file, they're much better, look at all these great features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer