wixsharp

> Even if they stick with Java and try to learn jpackage they quickly realize they need Windows, and a Mac, and maybe Linux just to make packages that their friends can run at all And when they test it on Windows they'll realize that the launcher that jpackage creates does something weird on startup (possibly involving relaunching itself? [1]) that makes Windows display a busy cursor for a while after the program has launched, so they'll have to forget about jpackage and redo it all with something like Packr [2] and Wix# [3]... [1] https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/fe45835f7cebfccd4544ae19... [2] https://github.com/libgdx/packr [3] https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp

The functionality in the msilib module is somewhat low-level anyway (it basically just opens the database for you and leaves the arcane incantations required for doing anything as an exercise for the reader) so it probably wouldn't be hugely difficult to replace it with ctypes calling msi.dll directly. If I were to replace my msilib-based installer, I would migrate to Wix# [1], a fantastic high-level wrapper for WiX that lets you express your installer in a few lines of C# (and then generates the thousands of lines of XML that WiX needs, but you don't need to touch it). I wouldn't have used msilib if I had known about Wix# at the time. [1] https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp