[wix-devs] RFC: Reducing components by ZIP'ing files into fewer components (even single)

[Heath Stewart]

It came up before years ago, but now we have another team that has gobs of files across many directories (so much so, that having all files in a directory per component doesn't actually reduce the count that much - something we're going to try to address with them as one route). Windows Installer incurs a perf hit for each components. Usually it's not noticeable, but when you need over 6,200 components (~4,300 split by directory) it shows significant degradation.

We're exploring options, but I wanted to ask about the feasibility of including support for a "standard CA" to unzip an archive as part of the installation process, such that a single component (at best) contains the ZIP file. Thoughts?

Heath Stewart
Visual Studio, Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths