[wix-users] Burn's MSI Size Limitation - Single MSI payload overflow

[Shay Martin]

Hello,

I currently have an MSI installer. This MSI needs to be bootstrapped using
burn to provide an .exe that passes the appropriate administrative
elevation to a script that is executed on install finalize, this script
does some prerequisite work required for our software. Administrative
elevation is required for this script.

There is no way around not using a script executed by the installer, sadly,
as I know this is not good practice. When executing the MSI directly, the
script is not passed along the administrative elevation, despite defining
the appropriate WIX elements/attributes in our source. However, excuting
the bootstrapped .exe correctly passes elevation to the script.

So our solution is to bootstrap the MSI. The problem, our software is
rapidly growing, when the MSI was sub ~2GB in size, Burn was able to
provide an .exe. Now, our MSI is reaching a size of ~4GB, Burn can no
longer create an .exe and results in an overflow error when linking (light)
our source.

There is no way for us to break apart our large MSI into smaller MSI(s).
Our single MSI has a custom UI for feature based installation.

I did some digging around, someone indicated the MSI payload size defined
in the Wix source for Burn is a 32 bit integer, yielding an upper limit for
a single MSI to be bootstrapped around ~2GB.

Is there a solution to get Burn to bootstrap this larger MSI?