I don't really remember why we initially used WiX. Possibly to silently
update any existing Blender installs? Anyway, the problem is that the
VCRuntime MergeModules are deprecated, and GHA has pretty much removed
them. So, we need to use NSIS to be able to trivially run the
vc.redist.exe installer. It runs an MSI, and WiX produces MSIs, so to
keep using WiX, we'd need to write an installer-coordinator. Forget
about it. Just use NSIS.
This will allow us to automate releases with the Blender 2.79
"experimenntal nightly" codebase. This is great because the newer
Blender uses Python 3.7 (instead of 3.5). This pulls from my fork of
Blender, which has a number of build improvements added on top.
Somewhere around Blender 2.75, the SCONS build system was removed and
CMake reigned supreme. The installer was of course changed to a Windows
Installer generated by CPack. Unfortunately for us, the registry keys
changed. Windows Installer's registry stuff sucks, but this is the
easiest way for us to get at it.
