MSI Installation

PDFCreator PDFCreator English
1

Hello,

one of the users of this product approached me with the request to create a compliant MSI installation. Those who are interested in MSI probably know that the current MSI is only a wrapper that only launches setup.exe; consequently, it does not offer all advantages of the true MSI, such as possibility to repair it, to deploy by group policy, etc.

So I made new MSI, by repackaging. The result is fully compliant MSI, and I successfully tested it in XP and Windows 7. It can be deployed by group policy and does everything MSI is supposed to do. However, it does not implement all features of the original setup, since I don't know if they are really required by many. What is not implemented: server mode; and multiple languages (although Help in 3 languages is there). If there's demand for these features, I can do them as well.

During this development, my idea was to make it my contribution into this open source project, and I made two attempts to contact the developers. But I did not hear a word in response from them.

So, I made this MSI available at my own website http://www.vadimrapp.com/software.htm for $30 by Paypal. I think, since MSI form allegedly is only used at companies' networks, this is reasonable.

I have to mention that I have no idea how this effort is related to the license on the product. I honestly tried to analyze this aspect and read the license on PDFCReator, but I gave up. Two days ago at work I signed $3M contract after heavy discussion on the legal terms of it, and those terms were nothing compared to the license on PDFCreator. If somebody (the authors, or anybody else) is capable of reading it in its entirety and telling me if my installation is legal or not , I will immediately comply (my contact information is at my website as well). For now, I'm just assuming that what I created is needed by the users, and I honestly say that to the best of my understanding of this incredible document, it's legal.

2

Sir, you probably need to list the source code link in your website, and state that the msi installition package is a service, not the software itself.

Like this link below:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/files/PDFCreator/PDFCreator%201.2.0/PDFCreator-1_2_0_source.zip/download

 

p.s.: It must be a good news for those for-profit companies who want to deploy the pdfcreator's MSI installer.

3

Thank you for your work vrapp.

I donated to support the msi installer over a year ago form my personal money since I cant get my company to donate via paypal. I am very disappointed about the lacking from a result since then. Information is very rare about it. We are working on it, since years now.

It is very sad to heare now, that you made the msi without the support of the developers in a supposedly shorter amount of time and that the developer did not even care to respond to you.

I will never donate even a penny to this project.

 

4

again I have to say, capturing a setup and doing a repackage ist not the same as developing a setup package. We have developed the current setup for several years and considered may points as several old and new Windows versions and even workarounds for some defects in the Windows intallation itself.

Grabbing an install may work for others as well, but lacks most of the points just mentioned. If it works, this is just well, but it takes a lot more to create a real setup. As we do not want to be held responsible for the results, we did not do a repackaging, but work on a new install from ground on. But this takes a lot of time, and even more time than we had thought.

So we hope for the patience of everyone here. In the meantime, we would rather recommend wrapping the exe than using a captured setup.

regards,
Philip