Is it possible to programatically change an msi's database on Linux

Question

I know you can change it using cscript.exe on Windows. Is there a Linux program providing cscript-like functionality? Or is there some other way I can change the database in Linux?

Zenobia

MSI is supposedly the Microsoft Installer, a very Windows-specific beast. What are you even doing with that on Linux? – Breezy

@Henning my guess is some sort of web service or site – Catabolite

Answer 1

CScript is just the script execution engine; it knows nothing about MSI directly. Check out Wine; it implements some/most of msi.dll, so as long as functions like MsiDatabaseOpenView and MsiViewExecute are correctly implemented, you should be able to use it to modify an .msi package.

Gorey

Ugh. Yeah this is probably the way to do it. I think I'm going to end up running a Windows box instead of mucking around in a bunch of C libraries. – Zenobia

I ported Wine's code to a standalone library that can run on Linux - see https://mcmap.net/q/507804/-build-msi-in-wine for more details. Help is welcome, the source code is also on github at github.com/bonzini/msitools.git – Bettyebettzel