WiX Installer

The files in this directory are used to produce an MSI installer using the WiX Toolset (http://wixtoolset.org/).

The MSI installers require elevated (admin) privileges due to the installation of MSVC CRT libraries into the Windows system store. See the Inno Setup installers in the inno sibling directory for installers that do not have this requirement.

Requirements

Building the WiX installer requires a Windows machine.

The following system dependencies must be installed:

• Python 3.8+ (to run the packaging.py script)

Building

The packaging.py script automates the process of producing an MSI installer. It manages fetching and configuring non-system dependencies (such as gettext, and various Python packages). It can be run from a basic cmd.exe Window (i.e. activating the MSBuildTools environment is not required).

From the prompt, change to the Mercurial source directory. e.g. cd c:\src\hg.

Next, invoke packaging.py to produce an MSI installer.:

$ py -3 contrib\packaging\packaging.py \
    wix --pyoxidizer-target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

If everything runs as intended, dependencies will be fetched and configured into the build sub-directory, Mercurial will be built, and an installer placed in the dist sub-directory. The final line of output should print the name of the generated installer.

Additional options may be configured. Run packaging.py wix --help to see a list of program flags.

Relationship to TortoiseHG

TortoiseHG uses the WiX files in this directory.

The code for building TortoiseHG installers lives at https://foss.heptapod.net/mercurial/tortoisehg/thg-winbuild and is maintained by Steve Borho (steve@borho.org).

When changing behavior of the WiX installer, be sure to notify the TortoiseHG Project of the changes so they have ample time provide feedback and react to those changes.