Translated .msi installers

[VFLins]

What is the problem or limitation you are having?

The WiX tooling used to generate .msi installers for Windows have features for handling different installer languages, but this is not exposed to the briefcase user.

Describe the solution you'd like

The ideal solution would be something in the lines of

briefcase would allow a list of language codes to be passed to the cli or the the tool.briefcase.app.<appname>.windows section of the pyproject.toml file. The first item of the list should be the initial/fallback language displayed by the installer, and if the list has more than one value, the first installation step should display a language selction that translates the installer's GUI.

The user's choice would then be available to a post-install script, to make the language selected by the user during installation reflect the installed program's language.

But .msi installers apparently do not implement a languge selector

So according to this thread, the solution that looks possible to implement is a installer that will show itself in one of the preconfigured languages based on the Windows' language. This multi-language approach is, based on this article, undocumented and not well tested by Microsoft, altough it's an old article.

The more documented and simpler solution

The WiX toolset handles single language installers, it requres a .wxl markup file that provides a translation to every text present in the installer's GUI. In this case, briefcase would need one those files translating the defualt installation process for each language supported by briefcase, and apparently, some files already exists.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Briefcase currently does not support languages on .msi Windows installers.

Additional context

No response

[freakboy3742]

Agreed that supporting non-English languages in an installer would be a useful addition. As you've noted WiXUI already has a bunch of translations in place; we'd likely need to augment those translations with the additional strings that are custom to the Briefcase installer.

The key detail that needs investigation at this point is how to generate a translated installer. The WiX documentation seems to suggest producing a single-language installer isn't very difficult; the simple approach might to be to allow a --lang option when running briefcase package; if a language is specified, the installer is built with that language.

A better approach would be a single language that adapts to the local language settings - but the documentation you've linked suggests that might not be simple.