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WiX (.msi) Installer For Wireshark

This is an experimental feature to provide Wireshark with an .msi installer as requested in issue 8814. It might one day replace the NSIS installer, but needs to be a little more complete before doing so.

Differences/Notes Compared To The NSIS Installer

  1. You need the WiX toolset to build the .msi installer. Version 3.10 or later is recommended.

  2. SNMP, Radius, Diameter, and Qt translations files are harvested to be included in the installer. Any custom/additional files just need to be written to the appropriate build output directory and the installer will pick them up. NSIS required modifying a file (custom_mibs.txt, etc) for inclusion

  3. Plugin DLLs are not automatically harvested. To include your DLL, modify Plugins.wxi.

  4. To build the WiX installer run:

> msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo wix_package_prep.vcxproj
> msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo wix_package.vcxproj

Known Issues

  1. The .msi installer does not include and install Npcap or USBPcap like the NSIS installer does. These currently come as NSIS-generated .exe installers. We might be able to bundle them as ExePackage elements.

  1. Transitioning, upgrading, downgrading, and reinstalling is more tricky. The NSIS-based installer handles previously-installed versions by running any existing uninstaller prior to installation, which empties the installation directory and removes registry entries. These are subsequently filled back in by the installer. The Windows Installer architecture keeps track of installed items in a database and uses the UpgradeCode property to identify installed products and the MajorUpgrade property to control upgrade behavior. As a result,

    • We can’t easily upgrade from an NSIS-based installation to a .msi installation, and vice versa.

    • We have to be careful about setting things like UpgradeCode, MajorUpgrade, and REINSTALLMODE in our WiX configuration.

  2. The lax behavior of the NSIS-based installer lets you install more than one copy of Wireshark if you specify different installation directories. (The most recently installed version "wins" as far as registry entries and file associations go). The .msi installer doesn’t allow this.

Patches welcome to address any of the issues above or improvements you think can be made.