msi ole automation: where to next?

[Misha Koshelev]

On Mon, 2007-05-21 at 08:23 -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
> Misha wrote:
> > [I have the scripting required by the Vector NTI and the iTunes 7 installers
> >  working.  What should I do next?]
> 
> First off, congratulations!
> 
> If you're interested in continuing to work on MSI, I'd suggest
> asking James Hawkins for suggestions.
> 
> If you're more interested in adding COM interfaces to things,
> perhaps implementing the iTextServices api to riched20
> would be useful.  Maarten got started on that, but I think
> it's not complete enough for say, Google Talk to function.
> 
> Most useful of all might be for you to look at
> improving our COM implementation itself.  Rob Shearman
> could give you suggestions on where to start there.
> - Dan
> 

Thanks Dan for your thoughtful descriptions, I will have to mull over
where to head next.

I guess what I am still concerned about is this blurb from an email Mike
McCormack had sent me when I started working on the scripting/automation
stuff:

> The work that I was doing is aimed at running custom action threads in
> a separate process.  It will require the OLE interfaces
> (Session/Installer) to be working before the custom actions can run
> out of process.  The custom action queue needs to be exposed by
> another OLE interface so that msiexec can query it. 

Now I really don't understand this or whether this is still the plan for
custom actions (James?) or why having custom action threads in a
separate process would require Session and Installer to be working at
all, since they are mostly just wrappers around the C functions, which
seem to be much easier to call from another C program like msiexec than
the automation functions. However, I want to make sure that the full
Installer/Session functionality is not required by something like this
that could potentially improve more than just scripting support before I
completely move on to something else...

Thanks
Misha