// readme

msitools

Introduction

msitools is a set of programs to inspect and build Windows Installer (.MSI) files. It is based on libmsi, a portable library to read and write .MSI files. libmsi in turn is a port of (and a subset of) Wine’s implementation of the Windows Installer.

msitools plans to be a solution for packaging and deployment of cross-compiled Windows applications.

Tools

Provided tools include:

  • msiinfo, to inspect MSI files

  • msibuild, a low-level tool to create MSI files

  • msidiff, compares contents of two MSI files with diff

  • msidump, dumps raw MSI tables and stream content

  • msiextract, to inspect and extract the files of an MSI file

  • wixl, a WiX-like tool, that builds Windows Installer (MSI) packages from an XML document, and tries to share the same syntax as the WiX toolset

  • wixl-heat, a tool that builds XML fragments from a list of files and directories.

Building

msitools is built with Meson. You will need:

  • a C compiler, pkg-config, Meson >= 1.4 and Ninja

  • a Vala compiler (valac)

  • bison and perl

  • GLib, GObject and…