At the moment, I have to write some custom actions in an add-on-installer for our software that deal with certain configuration issues on the customer's site. (It' actually a Basic-MSI-Installer)
Everytime I have to write code in InstallScript, I get deeply depressed.. It is amazing how badly designed a scripting language can be.
I would really like to write my custom actions in a different high-level language, e.g. ruby; Can anybody tell me, if this is easily possible?
What would I have to do to write my custom actions in ruby? How if anyhow at all could I integrate them into my installer? I have seen that it's possible to use DLLs compiled from C or C++, but that is not really an option, that would be even more complicated.
If you can compile and create an .exe out of your Ruby code it wouldn't be a problem. We've build a custom action to do some SQL statements in VB and i execute it with some parameters as a custom action. I also used some VBS as custom actions in other installers.
We don't currently have support for any additional scripting languages other than those directly supported by Windows Installer (VBS, J#). However if you're willing to leverage (and depend on) .NET, you could look into the recent DTF toolkit (search some recent WiX announcements), or wait for our upcoming managed code support. Either of these paths can result in Custom Actions that you can write in various non-C++/non-InstallScript languages, but the .NET dependency could be a heavy burden.
Alternately if you can "compile" ruby down to a C++ style DLL which can be invoked as a custom action (perhaps its interpreter as a DLL with a script in a known location), that could work as well; that's definitely an advanced method, though.
