Bizarre idea: creating our own extension to msi for cross-platform installers

Scott Ritchie scott at open-vote.org
Sun Jul 27 03:39:55 CDT 2008


Just a crazy thought, but...

What if we created a standard for passing some sort of wine-specific
metadata in an MSI file?  Windows would ignore it, but application
developers could use it to include some helpful Linux-specific Wine
instructions like what windows version to use, a custom .desktop file,
or even instructions to install into a completely independent Wine prefix.

This way, a single .msi file could be a true universal installer for
both Windows machines and Linux machines.  Moreover, there'd be less of
a need to create custom Wine packages for applications like Picassa
since a lot of that functionality would be abstracted into Wine itself.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie



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