Software Deployment

Common sense would have directed you to back up the AIP before patching it. I've never tried - since Captain Paranoia always take back-ups - but you *may* be able to uninstall the patches but some may be marked as non-uninstallable (did I just invent a word?).

EDIT:
Light bulb! Retrieve the original, as-supplied-from-the-vendor (or, as-extracted-from-your-source-control-system) MSI and create a new AIP from that.

I think the point is to get the files that were extracted with the AIP back into the MSI to have one 'all in one' installer. I think there might be a vbs for that in the Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers, but I'm not sure, have a look at it (Ian might know by heart what it's called and how to use it)

Rgds,

PJ

Have you tried specifying your compression preferences on the media settings page of your packaging tool, eg WPS? Assuming you're using one, of course.

Actually I'm not using any packaging tool. Just using simple command line. And I'm not worried about backups - I'm doing this on a test machine.

But using the msiexec /a extracts the .cab files (Admin install, right?). Again, that's expected. But shouldn't there be a msiexec /compact or something? Surely, if you can extract all the contents of the .msi file using msixec, you should be able to put them back into the same tidy package using the same command.

That's what I would have thought. But if there's no way to do this without using a packaging tool (we don't have one in our environment), guess I'll just have to deploy each manually through SCCM.

I can see your line of thinking but unfortunately there's no easy msiexec switch to reverse the AIP creation.

You can, however, use the patched AIP (and MSI that is created within that location) to deploy to your clients; you will just need to keep the source files uncompressed unless you have a packaging tool to hand. But still not recommended in the case of Microsoft vendor MSIs.

Is it me? Is it?

If you've created an AIP, you must have the original MSI, since you presumably specified a different path for the files to be extracted to. Or, as I say, you should have the original media with the original MSI on it.

Might this be what you are searching for VacTracks?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa369279(v=VS.85).aspx

Take a close look to MakeCab.exe(to create cab files) and Msidb.exe(to stream them into your MSI) from the Windows Installer SDK

Here some more links which could help you:
http://www.contactez.net/support/msi6.html
http://www.contactez.net/support/msi2.html