README

msitools is a set of programs to inspect and build Windows Installer
(.MSI) files.  It is based on libmsi, a portable library to read and
write .MSI files.  libmsi in turn is a port of (and a subset of) Wine's
implementation of the Windows Installer.

msitools plans to be a solution for packaging and deployment of
cross-compiled Windows applications.

Provided tools include:

- msiinfo, to inspect MSI files

- msibuild, a low-level tool to create MSI files

- wixl, a WiX-like tool, that builds Windows Installer (MSI) packages
  from an XML document, and tries to share the same syntax as the WiX
  toolset, http://wixtoolset.org/

- wixl-heat, a tool that builds XML fragments from a list of files
  and directories.

Right now, msitools does not work under Windows.  It is planned that
it will self-host.

While in a very early stage, it is already usable.

msitools uses libgsf in order to read OLE Structured Storage files
(which are the underlying format of .MSI files).  As of December 7th,
2012 you need to build libgsf from git because a required bugfix is not
found in any release.  Fedora packages for a fixed libgsf can be found
at http://bonzini.fedorapeople.org/.

Wixl lacks many features compared to WiX. As always, contributions
are welcome!

For more information, please contact us by email.  Forking and sending
github pull requests is also welcome.