Windows Installer Justification

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2007-05-09 11:41am

Okay, I appeal to the collective wisdom of G&C, because I'm at a loss. Is there any sort of good side to Windows Installer and its related ilk? And by that, I mean any piece of software that refuses to be uninstalled in safe mode. Part rant, yes, but also an honest question. Is there any sort of situation where such a protection is a good thing?

Post by **Beowulf** » 2007-05-09 11:58am

I'm fairly certain you can run msiexec in safe mode manually. Even found the command line options for you

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2007-05-09 12:29pm

As bad as Windows Installer is, there is a reason Microsoft made it. Because too many installers/uninstallers didnt work.

Oh, and your google-fu over support.microsoft.com is weak;How to start Windows Installer in Safe Mode

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2007-05-09 02:45pm

Hmm. Quite good to know, but one thing, Xon. That article specifically refers to various versions of Server 2003, and given that I'd be trying this stuff out on customer systems, I want to be sure before I jump, given that it contains registry-futzing. Any chance you've tried that on XP as well?

As for google-fu, I'm at work, I save that for home.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-05-09 02:51pm

You can also do nifty things with MSI like push them out via GPO and whatnot.

RThurmont · Post by **RThurmont** » 2007-05-09 04:21pm

I personally think that the Windows package management system (in XP) beats the heck out of OS X, in that it provides for self contained installers, but also offers some degree of centralized management. What I'd really like to see (and this may well be in Vista, but for other reasons I don't plan on using that OS) would be the Windows package management system extended with Linux like functionality, so that you could additionally benefit from dependency resolution of non-self-contained installers and have centralized update management.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2007-05-09 05:29pm

RThurmont wrote:What I'd really like to see (and this may well be in Vista, but for other reasons I don't plan on using that OS) would be the Windows package management system extended with Linux like functionality, so that you could additionally benefit from dependency resolution of non-self-contained installers and have centralized update management.

You can do a primitive version of that already with msi installer packages. Office is a good example of having a bunch of msi files for each Office app and then a master msi linking them all together.

Slap in a Question & Answer file and the whole thing can be automated. Not trivially due to the insane complexity, but it is doable.

White Haven wrote:I want to be sure before I jump, given that it contains registry-futzing. Any chance you've tried that on XP as well?

Windows Installer is identical on WinXP or Win2k3. Virtually all the time WinXP & Win2k3 share services or dlls, they are identical or Win2k3 has newer versions which are backwards compadible with the old versions.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2007-05-09 08:43pm

Was just makin sure, cool. Still a fucking powerstupid way to design a critical function, though. Gee, something's broken that's preventing Windows from booting properly. Surely no one will ever need to use Safe Mode to...what's that, fix a problem?

Post by **Beowulf** » 2007-05-09 11:43pm

White Haven wrote:Was just makin sure, cool. Still a fucking powerstupid way to design a critical function, though. Gee, something's broken that's preventing Windows from booting properly. Surely no one will ever need to use Safe Mode to...what's that, fix a problem?

I think it's that no one thought through the fact that it runs as a service. Namely, it doesn't run in safe mode. Of course, you can run it manually at the command line, still, you just need a bit more computer savvy to be able to do so.