[ANN] MSI based installer for Windows

[Steve Borho]

Hello,

I've just uploaded a new Mercurial installer to thg-winbuild that was
built with WIX [1]

http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/thg-winbuild/downloads/mercurial-unstable-1.4.3+7-86a6bc519592.msi

Moving to a Windows Installer [2] based packager is going to have to
happen sooner or later, and is basically mandated when shipping frozen
Python 2.6 applications because 2.6 was built with VC9 and now
requires real VC redistributables to be installed.  We can't just
throw a couple of DLLs in the install folder and hope things will
work.

MSI installers are much more friendly in corporate environments, so
this can only help improve adoption.

I'm hoping that people will try this package and report any problems
they have with it, especially if you find anything missing.

If you would like to see the scripts that built the package, see [3].
When these packages have proven themselves, I believe these scripts
should be moved into the Mercurial repository.  WIX scripts are
designed to be maintained along side the source code.

The msi installer is nearly twice as big as the older InnoSoft
installers.  I do not believe it's native compression is very good.
WIX itself is shipped as an uncompressed MSI file within a zip file.
We may do the same for our releases if it makes a large enough
difference.

--
Steve Borho

PS: These scripts will only build the default branch of mercurial, as
there were large directory layout changes after 1.4.

[1] http://wix.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372866%28VS.85%29.aspx
[3] http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/thg-winbuild/src/tip/wix/