I'm not a developer for Windows apps but had to use WiX to generate an installer... | Hacker News

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		kiike on April 6, 2024 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset I'm not a developer for Windows apps but had to use WiX to generate an installer for a Python open source project I am collaborating with. Installing one binary in a specific location? Easy. Couple hundred files distributed among multiple nested directories? That was a miserable experience and but I could manage to pull it off. I didn't use heat. The XML was hand-coded and the file listing was generated with a Python script that walked the directory tree and generated the Directory, Component and ComponentGroup entries. Apparently with Wix4, heat is deprecated, unneeded in Wix5. I couldn't even get it to install and have the executable. So confusing!

henry_flower on April 6, 2024 [–]

heh, I recently "ported" a Linux app to Windows and wrote a simple installer using wix 5 (it was horrible)

to even obtain wix v5: first, using scoop, I installed "dotnet-sdk"; second, using the "dotnet" command, I got the wix.exe executable via

> dotnet tool install --prerelease --global wix

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