jaoane 3 days ago

Uh??? It’s had one for 25 years already: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Installer

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pjc50 3 days ago

MSI certainly works, but it's also a deeply insane file format and the tooling for building MSI installers was never great. Hence InstallShield etc existed.

Kwpolska 3 days ago

InstallShield predates Windows Installer by about a decade.

cruffle_duffle 3 days ago

It’s funny though, because despite MSI coming into existence the problems InstallShield fix didn’t really change much.

pjc50 3 days ago

You're right, I've conflated MSI with .CAB which was used back in the floppy era.

WorldMaker 3 days ago

CAB is a format like ZIP. MSIs are fun because they use CAB files under the hood. But also a database format from the Microsoft JET Engine that was an ancient predecessor to the Windows Registry and contemporary/counterpart of the Office Access format at the time.

It's really interesting to compare MSI to MSIX which is ZIP/XML instead of CAB/weird JET DB file.