Windows Installer

[Alex Earl]

Hey All,

I've been looking at the Windows installer and thinking about moving it from Wix, which generates an MSI, to NSIS which generates an exe. The main reason for the switch is to reduce the complexity of building the installer. Moving to NSIS would allow building the installer on Linux, reducing the cost of the infrastructure as the current Wix build requires the full .NET framework in the build image/VM. I believe all of the features of the current installer can be easily replicated in NSIS. I'm wondering if anyone has knowledge of the history of why MSI was chosen in the first place; if there was a really good reason, I wouldn't want to stray from that without more consideration. 

Thanks,

Alex