I opened this issue to track all the efforts to migrate our current NSIS installer to MSI (Windows Installer).

I'm not talking about changing CPack NSIS to CPack WIX, but using WiX Toolset instead to create the installer from scratch.

Migrating to Windows Installer will give us a greater control over the installation and will give the user the best possible experience. Also I saw it being requested a lot. Hopefully we can do it before our next big release.

I need to collect some information first to be able to create the new installer the way everyone wants.

Questions

1. Do you want to install both 32-bit and 64-bit at the same time? Current installer requires removing one before installing the other.
2. Do you want to install the stable version (for daily use) and the nightly version (to test new features/bug fixes) at the same time?
3. Should all nightly builds be treated as the same product, that is, the new version replaces the old one, or should it be treated as a different product?
4. Should we provide plugins as a different installer that can be installed later, or we bundle them together with DB4S? If bundled, should we allow the user to have the option to install them (Custom Install) or just install DB4S + Plugins (Full Install) automatically?

Instead of waiting I already answered these questions myself. 😄

Answers

1. 32-bit and 64-bit are two different products and both can be installed together, even though I find it to be a useless option. It is only useful for 64-bit Windows and if you are on a 64-bit system why would you want to install 32-bit?
2. Stable and Nightly are treated as the same product. If you have stable version installed and tried to install a nightly version it will upgrade the stable to nightly.
3. All nightly are treated the same. Newer nightly version replaces the older one.
4. Everything is installed by default. There is no option to install the application without the plugins or install the plugins separately.

Please feel free to comment if you didn't like any of these default settings so we can change them. I just made a PR (#1400) so we can test it and go from there.

Finally, all open issues related to this one should be closed and moved to here. Thank you! 😃