WiseUser's blog

The Wise arm of Altiris has come up with a pretty slick technology in their "Linux Package Editor". It basically allows one to use a Windows box to create packages for Linux machines. Here's a list of the key features in this handy tool:

Windows Installer provides a special property that controls the application of versioning rules to installation files. Setting the property REINSTALLMODE to various values affects how Windows Installer decides which files to replace and which to ignore during installation.

In Wise Package Studio there is a file section where the packager should be aware of "Controlling File Versioning Settings" when they place files in the package. There may be a situation where the user wants to overwrite a file or just ignore if the file is present. Here's how to deal with those situations.

If you've created a package using Wise package studio, here's a way you can update a custom action using a patch.

It is easy to determine if Windows Installer prompts for a reboot because it installed over a file that is in use. The first step is to generate a verbose log file. In the verbose log file, look for the presence of the ReplacedInUseFiles property in the property dump.