Merge Module problem from Dark.exe decompliation

Question

I have been working for quite sometime to transfer all of the installations for my job from Wise for Windows Installer to WiX. Started with the obvious step (given the number of installations to transfer and their size) and decompiled them with Dark.exe (WiX toolkit). I have been creating a general purpose program to clean up the output from dark into a proper project that we can then compile into MSI's. The problem that has been kicking my @$$ for some time now is the merge modules. We have a maximum of 20 Microsoft MSM's in the various installations, and dark doesn't recongnize these as such so instead lists all the contents. I have everything in place so I can erase this garbage code and replace it with the proper Merge tag. Hence the problem. The merge modules don't have any rhyme or reason to where they are placed, no logic I can find to look for the main folder. The only real common ground is that the Directories, Components, Files, and Registry tags all have an Id ending with a GUID. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I already have the frame work in place to search through our list of Merge Modules and retreive the list of files, components, and directories. I just don't know what to look for so it is not speciallized to just one or two modules, but in theory all MICROSOFT modules (I know other companies might use other formats, but that is a mute issue). Thanks again!

Answer 1

It looks like you have been doing a lot of work reverse engineering the existing MSI's and cleaning up the result in an automated or semi-automated way.

Wouldn't it be more efficient and less error-prone to just create the wix source files from scratch? You might be able to leverage the heat.exe tool to reduce the required effort.