The way you worded your question it appeared that you were asking if you
could simply compress a .cab using 7-zip's LZMA compression algorithm &
I may be too used to people on this list expecting the minimum amount of
effort to solve anything remotely difficult (and subsequently blaming a
lack of Windows Installer familiarity on non-existent shortcomings in
WiX but lets not get started on that).
However 2 hours of time coding & testing compared to the 20 seconds it
takes to write <Media Id="1" Cabinet="mycab.cab" EmbedCab="yes"
CompressionLevel="high" /> ?
Could be worth feature requesting for something like Burn but taking
modern internet connections into consideration I don't see many people
being that bothered about it if they have to put that amount of effort
in to make it work.
FYI I just checked our installation archive sizes.
Raw data = 193 MB (202,991,281 bytes)
MSI with embedded Cab using "high" compression = 55.7 MB (58,464,768
bytes)
7z archive = 42 MB (44,049,930 bytes)
For the raw data & 7z archive I used the administrative install I use
for creating a minor update patch. MSI is generated with WiX
v3.0.5419.0. 7z archive is default "ultra" compression level settings in
7-zip v4.65.
It greatly depends on what your application is installing to the user's
machine on how big a difference you will see in the compression. If
you're taking 320 MB & compressing it to 35 MB I'm going to guess that
the majority of your files aren't binaries or of similar complexity but
are 'data' such as XML, images etc.
Palbinder Sandher
Software Deployment & IT Administrator
T: +44 (0) 141 945 8500
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-----Original Message-----
From: Wesley W. Terpstra [mailto:
[hidden email]]
Sent: 02 November 2009 16:31
To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] LZMA compression?
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Pally Sandher <
[hidden email]>
wrote:
> Try using "mszip" instead of "high" for compression on your media tag
> & see if that changes the size of the cab file.
It does. It becomes 99MB, i.e. bigger.
> If you want your
> files be installed without any extra work you're going to have to use
> the CAB format.
I thought it understood that I was willing to put in some work. :)
> My suggestion would be to build your MSI with the files "uncompressed"
> then compress them yourself using 7zip or whatever. You can then use a
> bootstrapper to uncompress your files before running the MSI to
> install it. Seems like a hell of a lot of work though for not a huge
> payoff & there are probably better ways to achieve the result, that
> was just off the top of my head.
Yes, I'd tried this already this morning. I ended up with a 35MB
installer when using a self-extracting 7zip archive of the uncompressed
msi. The down-side is that it dumps the uncompressed msi into the users
temporary folder before the installation begins, doubling the free space
required to perform an install. For such a big savings in download-time
I think that's a reasonable trade-off.
It was at most 2 hours of fiddling, so not that much work. Of course
35MB still isn't 27MB, but it's enough better than 77MB that I'm happy.
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