[Interest] Windows installer for Qt programs

Nils Jeisecke nils.jeisecke at saltation.com
Tue Apr 21 10:23:51 CEST 2020


Hi Alex,

Coming from a Qt background, Qt Installer framework would be an obvious
candidate. I've not used QIFW but IMHO the installer part is one of the
things that do not really cry out for cross platform.

So in the past I tended to use NSIS for Windows installers. It's
powerful, strange and quirky at the same time.

Today, I'm using MSI. That's still the native way to go on Windows. MSIs
basically consist of a cabinet file containing the files to install and
a database describing the modifications on the target system.

To build MSIs it's worth digging into the free WIX toolset starting with
one of the examples. WIX provides an XML based abstraction of the MSI
database and tools to bootstrap XMLs and build MSIs.

Yes, there's a rather steep learning curve (and you should not be
allergic to GUIDs ;-) but the setup will be well maintainable and
scriptable (basically XML files + your scripts to put things together).

For a good introduction I'd recommend the book: "Wix 3.6: A Developer's
Guide to Windows Installer XML". It also gives valuable information
about not-so-obvious challenges like multi-lingual setups.

Yes, there are a lot of badly authored MSIs in the wild - usually thrown
together using mainstream tools I will not name here. Please don't blame
Windows Installer for this.

Nils

Am 21.04.2020 um 09:19 hat "Alexander CarĂ´t" geschrieben:
>Hello all,
>
>I consider shipping my Qt built software with a conventional installer on Windows.
>
>Can anyone give me a recommendation of a solid freeware for this purpose ?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>best
>
>Alex
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