Automatic installation rev-eng utility

[Brian Vincent]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 22:09:54 +0200, Shachar Shemesh
<wine-devel at shemesh.biz> wrote:

> the hard disks shipped out to customers. The tools consist of a tool
> that understands what the original installation did, a database to do
> offline conflict resolution and other stuff, and a front end to perform
> a (silent) installation of the result. I have written most of the code

Putting on my sys admin hat that hasn't been worn in a long time...

Yeah, I think this would be useful.  Here's an example of why:

I tried running the current Word Viewer 2003 install program it failed
with MSI errors.  I simply tried copying over the installation
directory from a Windows partition but it didn't work.  Well, at that
point I could either corrupt my clean Wine install with a native MSI,
or I could try to sort out what the install program does on Windows. 
I used a program called InstallSpy 2.0 from 2BrightSparks to figure
out what the install program did.  I noticed it dumped some files in
c:\Program Files\Common Files\blah\blah\blah.  'Lo and behold, as soon
as I copied that folder over to my fake Windows drive, Word Viewer
worked just fine.  All in all, I probably spent about 15 minutes on
the solution and avoided native MSI.

Now, a program that monitored a Windows install, copied all of the
files created, generated a .reg file with registry changes, noted INI
file changes, and then built an RPM that would install on Linux.. that
would be cool.

-Brian